U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte in San Jose, California, said yesterday that the third trial in the Hynix case, originally set to begin next month, will take place no sooner than February. The FTC ruled Aug. 2 that Rambus engaged in ``deceptive conduct'' in order to control patents for high-speed computer memory chips.

In the final phase of the patent case, Hynix says it will use the same arguments presented by the FTC: that Rambus attended meetings of a memory-chip standards panel without disclosing the patents it would later enforce.

Whyte's ruling ``goes a long way towards supporting our claim that Rambus is not entitled to enforce these patents based on the antitrust laws,'' Ken Nissly, a lawyer representing Hynix, said in an interview late yesterday. The rulings issued by Whyte and the FTC ``present significant obstacles'' to Rambus enforcing its patents against the entire chip industry, Nissly said.

A federal jury in April awarded Rambus $307 million in its dispute with Ichon, South Korea-based Hynix, the world's second- largest memory chipmaker. Jurors agreed with Rambus's claim that Hynix infringed patents covering fundamental aspects of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, the main type of memory used in computers. Whyte later reduced the award to $133.4 million.

By: DocMemory
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