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Rambus tried to deceive patent office – Infineon

Case comes to court today

Infineon will attempt to prove that Rambus has not only tried to hoodwink the chip industry's standards body, JEDEC, but used similar tactics on the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The case finally comes to court later today after various delays.

The Siemens spin-off's allegation comes in its final pre-trial case summary and follows Rambus' admission of corrections to its SDRAM patents. The amendments were accepted by the PTO on 2 January - five months after Rambus launched its patent infringement case against Infineon.

The memory maker claims that Rambus failed to submit details of existing patents and prior art that it was well aware of to the PTO when it asked for the corrections to be made.

Infineon's allegation is clear: Rambus has been tinkering with its patents in order to strengthen its case.

That's in addition to Infineon's claim that Rambus officials tried to hide its SDRAM patent applications from JEDEC's SDRAM standard-setting group. Those patents originated in 1990, but Infineon claims they only take on board key SDRAM technologies in a patent amendment made in 1996 and 1997 - after JEDEC had fixed its SDRAM specification.

For its part, Rambus will attempt to show that Infineon knew all about its intellectual property - which it claims Infineon would later use without permission - long before JEDEC began to look at SDRAM as a next-generation memory standard. It will also try to prove that its 1990 patent does cover its right to claim ownership of key SDRAM technologies. ®

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