U.S. antitrust enforcers opened their case against technology company Rambus on Wednesday, telling a federal judge that Rambus had used a campaign of deception to illegally monopolize key computer chip technologies.
Attorneys for the Federal Trade Commission told U.S. Administrative Law Judge Stephen McGuire that Rambus duped the industry into adopting its own patented computer chip technology as a standard.
As a result, the FTC attorneys argued, Rambus is in a position to reap billions of dollars from computer chip manufacturers such as Micron Technology and Korea's Hynix Semiconductor.
"We're here because Rambus wants fair compensation for (its) inventions," Rambus attorney Gregory Stone said.
At issue is technology used for computer memory. In 1990, Rambus filed for a patent for a new memory technology called RDRAM. But it subsequently became a member of an industry group called JEDEC, which was trying to agree on a standard for another memory technology called SDRAM.
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