FROM 0 ce Bcc DATE = ME: SUBJECT ATTACHMENT sopy Goof Tato ssa com baieve@boncmark com, geectta@adobe com, horwigranbua com, inegreous com tecQrambus com, sberke@vegt com sanene97 179135 ‘samsung proposal - please give me your inputs by 12:24 i met monday in seoul with yw lee (ce0 semiconductors), gs chol (vp sales. ‘and marketing), hk im (gm dram division). itwas a long meeting but basically they beat me up for not coming back with a revisediower proposal on royalty rates. i told them we have ‘decided to give up trying to motivate them with royalty rates and royalty fates arent the issue anyways. they have the best dram royalty deal of ‘any partner - we gave ito them in return for best efforts marketing and they have done ZERO marketing for rambus to date. i made it clear that we have good relations with engineering and are winning customers without ‘Samsung, $0 well live without their help on marketing. and we will not touch the royalty agreement - we gave them our best shot proposals in ‘september and they rejected them. ‘my assessment is they are seeing that DDR is not going to beat direct rambus. the news we hear from via is that they are running ODR now at {66mhz, maybe 75mhz with one module (versus a goal of 10Omhz with 3). ‘samsung told me in the meeting that they never meant for people to consider DDR as a competitor to rambus (yeah, right), just as an incremental Jmprovement to sdram. ‘anyways, towards the end of the meeting mr. g.S. choi, vp sales and marketing - who i think is our chief enemy at the exec level at samsung - ‘sid that our royelty is ok but they want warrants like intel. i pointed ‘out that intel almost own's the processor business. he said samsung has 25% share on drams so they should get 25% of the warrants of intel. | ‘asked if he'd commit to what intel has: to not do any competitive memory ‘and to switch the market from sdram->direct rdram?. he said maybe. | said i'd talk to the board and see if they'd consider the proposal and tet him know early january. {think tis “possible", but not likely, that the scenario i that they {are disappointed wth ddr AND they have to cut back on spending, so they might actualy consider putting their eggs in the rambus basket if they can find a face-saving way to do £0. | would lke to propose to them in ear january that 2) they sign a contract amendment saying they are going to work only on direct rambus dram after scram (they can do frequency enhancements fo existing sdram but no functional changes): ») they publicly announce they are dropping dar (at least for main memory) and wl focus al oftheir efforts on direct rambus as the successor to sdram €) when they have done (a) and (3) we give them warrants for 250K shares at the market price that day, exercisable when >20% oftheir production is direct rambus - a8 long 28 they have not developed or worked on any competitive memory interface technology inthe meantime ‘making the warrant contingent would mean that, as with intel, we have a one time PAL hit for the increase in value x number of warrants when they do exercise. R 235324 RH 387818 (OUTSIDE COUNSEL ONLY ‘ex0983-001also, f we were to agree on this with samsung we would have to offer ‘something like this, prorated by market share, to many of our olher larger Fram partners (think LG, NEC, TI for sure). finally - wil be checking in parallel to make sure this proposal does ‘not have any legal issues or antirust issues. thanks, geoff Geoff Tate Rambus ‘Tel NEW AREA CODE: 650-903-3807 FAX NEW AREA CODE: 650-965-1528 “NOTE: THIS EMAIL MAY CONTAIN RAMBUS CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION" RH 387819 R 235325 OUTSIDE COUNSEL ONLY ‘ex0983-002