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Supreme Court Rejects Hynix-Rambus Patent Battle

By Robyn Hagan Cain on February 24, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. won’t be arguing to the Supreme Court why frequent Federal Circuit Court of Appeals litigant Rambus should be barred enforcing certain patents. This week, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case between the two companies.

Rambus, which describes itself as “one of the world’s premier technology licensing companies,” has been mired in patent litigation with Hynix since the ’90s. Hynix had asked the Court to consider whether Rambus had illegally sued for patent infringement, reports Reuters.

In 1992, Rambus became a member of the Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC), an open standard setting organization that develops standards for semi-conductor products, including computer memory interfaces, to facilitate the interchangeability of products produced by different manufacturers.

Members of a JEDEC committee meet several times a year to hear presentations by other members on proposed features to be included in the standard. The members then vote for which features to include.

Richard Crisp represented Rambus at JEDEC. After Crisp heard presentations on features to be included in the standard at JEDEC, he would discuss the inventions with the attorneys prosecuting Rambus' patents, signaling them to direct Rambus' prosecution efforts to cover those features.

Hynix was appealing a May 2011 decision from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the Supreme Court to find that Rambus shouldn't be able to enforce certain patents because it allegedly misled JEDEC by hiding its plans to patent technologies that JEDEC adopted, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Rambus, however, claimed that it was the victim of a semiconductor industry conspiracy to steal its technology, and merely sued those companies that were unwilling to pay licensing fees for the technology, according to Bloomberg.

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