Court: Rambus committed fraud

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled Wednesday that Rambus committed fraud against Infineon by failing to properly disclose patent information when required by an industry standards body. The jury awarded Infineon $3.5 million, but Judge Robert Payne is likely to reduce the award to $350,000 to conform with state laws. Infineon had sought $105 million.

The verdict will likely reverberate through the PC industry. Rambus sued Infineon, alleging that the German memory manufacturer owed it royalties on its output of SDRAM, the most common form of memory used in PCs, and DDR DRAM, a high-speed memory design gaining popularity.

Infineon filed a counterclaim alleging Rambus did not properly disclose its patents to the Joint Electronic Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC), a trade group formed to set standards for computer memory chips. The failure to disclose amounted to fraud, Infineon claimed, because Rambus' technology was integrated into what was supposed to be an open, royalty-free standard.

Earlier in the week, the court dismissed Rambus' suit. On Wednesday, the jury affirmed Infineon's counterclaim for fraud. --Michael Kanellos, Special to ZDNet News