Rambus Incorporated
 |
|
| Public | |
| Traded as |
NASDAQ: RMBS S&P 600 Component |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Headquarters | 1050 Enterprise Way, Suite 700 Sunnyvale, California United States |
|
Key people
|
Mark Horowitz, Co-Founder Mike Farmwald, Co-Founder Dr. Ronald Black, CEO |
|
Number of employees
|
425 |
| Website |
www.rambus.com www.rambus.com/lighting/ |
Rambus Incorporated, founded in 1990, is an American technology licensing company known primarily for their development of RDRAM. Today the company is developing memory systems for next generation smartphones and tablets and with the acquisition of Cryptography Research Inc, now developing security solutions for cloud computing and mobile devices.
Rambus, a California company, was incorporated in 1990 and re-incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1997. The company was listed on NASDAQ in 1997 under the code RMBS. As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, history of Rambus has been "marked by litigation, including patent battles with numerous chip makers".
Rambus' share price has ranged between a high of nearly $150 in 2000 to a low of approximately $3 in 2002 with a 4:1 split on June 15, 2000. Rambus' share price in the first quarter of 2010 was between $20 and $24, giving the firm a market capitalization value of around $2.5 billion.
An early version of RDRAM, base RDRAM, was used in the Nintendo 64 that was released in 1996.
The first PC motherboards with support for RDRAM were released in 1999. They supported PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 400 MHz but presented data on both the rising and falling edge of the clock cycle resulting in effectively 800 MHz, and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth over a 16-bit bus using a 184-pin RIMM form factor. This was significantly faster than the previous standard, PC133 SDRAM, which operated at 133 MHz and delivered 1066 MB/s of bandwidth over a 64-bit bus using a 168-pin DIMM form factor.
Some disadvantages of RDRAM technology, however, included significantly increased latency, power dissipation as heat, manufacturing complexity, and cost. PC800 RDRAM operated with a minimum latency of 45 ns, compared to 15 ns for PC133 SDRAM. RDRAMs can also be told to increase their latencies in order to prevent the possibility of two or more chips transmitting at the same time and causing a collision. However, SDRAM latency depends on the current state of memory so its latency can vary widely depending on what happened earlier and the strategy used by the SDRAM controller, while RDRAM latency is constant once it has been established by the memory controller. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, necessitating heatsinks on all RIMM devices. RDRAM also includes a memory controller on each memory chip, significantly increasing manufacturing complexity compared to SDRAM, which used a single memory controller located on the northbridge chipset. RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC133 SDRAM due to manufacturing costs, license fees and other market factors.
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Wikipedia