Wanna design a chip that talks to silly-fast GDDR6? You'll have to talk to Rambus, too Patent troll Semiconductor licensing giant Rambus announced this week a physical layer design for accessing GDDR6 – aka double data rate type six synchronous graphics random-access memory. This GDDR6 PHY blueprint is aimed at hooking up high-speed, high-bandwidth GDDR6 SGRAM to hardware accelerators and processors to rapidly …
Rambus does its own design work (like ARM). It is not one of the companies that buys patents from other companies then tries to license them,
How many man years did Rambus need to design and verify their GDDR6 PHY and how much would it cost for a user of GDDR6 to do their own design ?
This is the sort of IP that companies will readily license if the fees are not too high.
In this case they are licensing a design for GDDR6 usage, to which I say good luck to them.
In the past they were involved in the worst sort of patent trolling, where they were involved in the design of DDR memory standards and failed to disclose patents that the proposed standard infringed, and then after it was ratified they demanded royalties from all manufacturers.
Are you not familiar with Rambus? The fees will be too high, the technology probably half baked, and anyone making an appealing target is getting sued. They sued everyone who manufactured DDR RAM in the early 2000's. It was basically racketeering fwiw and I don't recall them being too successful but I do believe they eventually got Micron to cough up money to them.
They're not really a patent troll in the same way that Microsoft kept development going on IE 6 prior to Firefox becoming a threat around 2004. It's sort of bullshit and everyone paying attention knows better, but whatever they want to say.
My experience with Rambus memory in the early 2000s was reasonable; PIII 1GHz Coppermine with Rambus was actually pretty usable (could run somewhat stripped-down windows 7 or XP pretty gracefully, when coupled with a fast hard disk and a decent graphics accelerator card) until around 2010. My PIII 866 machines on PC133 RAM felt very sluggish when doing anything heavily graphical... while the tech seemed to hold up (and i'm not going to complain about free hand-me-down hardware), I was never a fan of their handling of the whole patent thing.
Samsung just announced the mass production of GDDR6 with 18 Gbps per pin, which is more than Rambus can handle or the JEDEC standard actually calls for.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12365/samsung-updates-on-gddr6-portfolio-8-gbps-ics-new-io-speed-bins-included
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