Rambus Inc. on Friday said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied Infineon Technologies AG's motion for an en banc rehearing of the earlier decision absolving Rambus of fraud.

That ruling also sent the case back to the lower court to retry Rambus's claim that Infineon infringed its synchronous DRAM patents under a broader guideline.

John Danforth, Rambus senior vice president and general counsel, said, "The full circuit court reviewed the case and in a short time upheld the earlier decision of a three-judge panel. The fraud theory implicating Rambus is thrown out and the issue of Infineon infringement of our patents will be retried."

An Infineon spokeswoman said the German chipmaker is reviewing the latest appellate court decision before deciding on a future course of action.

The Court of Appeals in January ruled that Rambus didn't commit fraud by failing to disclose its pending synchronous DRAM patents at the time the chip design firm participated in the JEDEC industry panel deliberations to draft a SDRAM standard. A federal district court jury in Richmond, Va. in 2001 found that Rambus was guilty of fraud for the nondisclosure.

After the appellate court panel ruling in January, JEDEC officials and other industry standards groups expressed concern that the decision could hamper the drafting of open standards, allowing participants to not disclose pending patents for technology under review.

The three judge panel also threw out the ruling of the lower court jurist that Infineon didn't infringe Rambus syrnchronous DRAM patents because the German chipmaker didn't use a multiplexed memory bus for its SDRAMs. Rambus' infringement claim against Infineon was sent back to the Richmond court to be retried, but under guidelines that don't use the multiplexed bus as a sole criteria.

Rambus has always claimed it disclosed to JEDEC its original syrnchronous patent, which was only amended in later filings. The appellate court also ruled that Rambus didn't have to disclose its pending patents to JEDEC until the SDRAM standard came up for balloting, which came after Rambus had left the industry group.

By: DocMemory
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