A 12-member jury verdict found that Rambus failed to prove its case against Micron and Hynix on price fixing.

Rambus had argued during a three-month jury trial earlier this year that the two companies and others colluded to fix the price of memory chips and shut Rambus's RDRAM technology out of the market.

Tom Lavelle, Rambus senior vice president and general counsel, said the jury's verdict has no legal bearing on existing Rambus licensing deals, including the company's $900 million licensing agreement with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Lavelle said the verdict won't have any bearing on any of the several other trials Rambus is currently involved in, which are patent infringement cases.

Lavelle said Rambus would look at "a lot of things" when considering options for appeal, including a decision by the trial judge—James McBride—not to allow the jury to be shown evidence that Samsung executives pleaded guilty to participating in price-fixing collusion and a ruling that the case be held as a "rule of reason" case, rather than a "per se" case. "I'm not in a position to say what if any grounds we are going to appeal on at this point, but those are certainly two of the things that we are going to be looking at," Lavelle said.

"We are very pleased that the jury considered all the evidence at issue in this case and determined that Rambus' allegations against the company were completely without merit," said Steve Appleton, Micron's chairman and CEO, in a statement issued by Micron.

The jury verdict is a significant blow to Rambus, which was seeking $3.95 billion in damages—an amount that would have been tripled under California law to $11.9 billion.In the trial, Rambus argued that Micron and Hynix conspired to constrain availability of Rambus’ RDRAM and keep its prices unnaturally high in an effort to eliminate it from the marketplace. Rambus alleges that Micron and Hynix raised the prices of their double data rate DRAM chips by as much as 500 percent after RDRAM—a proprietary Rambus technology—was eliminated from the market.

Micron said it presented evidence at the trial that RDRAM was prevented from gaining wide acceptance in the market because of design flaws, higher manufacturing costs and other drawbacks associated with the technology.

By: DocMemory
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