Rambus announce a law suit against Hitachi, makers of the Dreamcast CPU

In a press release issued yesterday, Rambus Inc. revealed that they had filed a suit in the Federal District Court in Delaware against Hitachi Ltd. for wilful patent infringements. Rambus are seeking to halt the importation, sale, manufacture and use of certain Hitachi products, including the SH-4 microprocessor currently powering your Dreamcast.

Under a licensing agreement, Rambus transferred technology to Hitachi for the purpose of enabling Hitachi to manufacture RDRAM compatible memory and logic products. CEO of Rambus Inc. Geoff Tate believes that, to date, Hitachi haven't produced such compatible memory and logic products. The suit filed yesterday is in response to Hitachi's failure at co-operating with repeated requests by Rambus to conduct further discussions regarding the detailed infringement analysis of Hitachi's non-RDRAM-compatible products. In other words, someone at Rambus is of the opinion that instead of making RDRAM compatible products, Hitachi took technology developed by Rambus and used it to develop their own set of non-RDRAM-compatible products.

So what does this mean? Will Dreamcast production stop as a result of the lawsuit? Probably not, but we'll keep an eye on the whole mess to see what happens.


Courtesy of IGN.com