From: Bill Davidow Sent: Friday, July 11, 1997 3:06 PM To: “Mooring, Dave’; ‘Tate, Geoff Subject: FW: DRAM Suppliers and Rambus | sent Dave's memo with minor modifactions and my lead paragraph. >From: Bill Davidow Friday, July 11, 1997 2:04 PM "Parker, Gerry’ >Subject! "DRAM Suppliers and Rambus >Gerry, | have been discussing the DRAM Company problem with Rambus, Below is >one of the updates. One of the things we have avoided discussing with our >pariners is intellectual property problem discussed in the fourth paragraph >We feel that it would drive a deeper wedge between us some of them and that >maybe the problem will solve itself wih time, We are hoping that they will >either drop their competitive efforts or discover for themselves that they >have violated Rambus patents and will conclude that getting around them will >be either extremely difficult or impossible and will take a fot of time, BELOW IS THE RAMBUS UPDATE >The President of the Siemens DRAM Division, Dr. Andreas von Zitsewitz, was >at Rambus on July 3. We finalized the terms of the deal. He said they would sign the contract in July. >They willbe the last of the top 13 DRAM companies to sign up. In fact, >they are the 13th largest vendor. >Dr. von Zitsewite told us he has 8000 total employees. One of them is working on Synclink (SLDRAM). That one engineer is stationed at Mosaic. >Mosaid is the licensing/development firm which is designing the SLORAM for >royalles. >We have not yet told Siemens thal we think SLDRAM and SDRAM-DDR infringe our patents. We think that willjustiritate them, Hopefully. SLORAM >and DDR will die due to their technicaliinfrastructure faults so we don't >have to play that card >Siemens has been telling the European press that they will ry to pressure >intel into doing a chipset that supports the SLORAM, >We explained to Siemens our shared R&D business model, By the time we have >completed the Direct Rambus program. Rambus will have expended in excess of >§100M, Dr. von Zitsewitz seemed to understand that the Siemens’ fees were >a fair proration of this. >The issue that has been the largest with Siemens, as with IBM, TI, Fujitsu, >Mitsubishi, and Micron has been our requirement to poo! patents on the >Rambus Interface Technology. Intel has insisted that we not back down on >this requirement, We agree with this approach. It delays the contract >signings substantially, but makes RDRAMS the least royalty burdened and >most open memory standard >We also explained to Siemens that with our RDRAM royalty cap of 2% (per the >our contract wit Intel) plus the patent pooling, the RORAM willbe the CONFIDENTIAL - FTC DOCKET NO. 9302 RFO643470 ‘cx0939-001least royalty burdened DRAM, For example, Samsung is proud to have settled >with THor a billion dollars in royalty payments for DRAM patent infringement. On the other side, Samsung is going after Fujitsu and others for SDRAM interface patent infringement. >Speaking of Samsung, their largest issue appears to be one of control. We could salve some of this by forming @ Rambus standards committee and giving >Samsung and others a vote, Unfortunately, this is exactly what intel doesn't want, Intel needs a 100% compatible standard part that is quickly >developed and commoditized. This is the opposite of what Samsung wants. >If we gave each ORAM company a vote equal to that of Inte's, then we could >end Sup with a real mess. For example, Intel recently demanded we lower the >lermination voltage to 1.8 volts; we agreed and are forcing the DRAM >companies to this goal; left 1 their own voting, the DRAM companies would >absolutely not have done this >in summary, Siemens’ today is fiercely oppositional, After they sign the contract and we have started to support them, they should become al least neutral, So far our new licensees have been impressed with our engineering deliverables they received immediately after contract signing >We will put together @ top level strategy, hopefully in conjunction with intel, that wil >A) Continue to let intel meet their goals 3B) Minimize the pain to the DRAM companies >So far the B list has been fairly short, because A has always taken precedence. CONFIDENTIAL - FTC DOCKET NO. 9302 RFO643471 ‘x0939-002