The story
Founded by Mike Farmwald in 1990.1
Rambus was founded in March 1990 by electrical and computer engineers, Mike Farmwald and Mark Horowitz. The company's early investors included premier venture capital and investment banking firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Merrill Lynch, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.
Rambus was incorporated and founded as a California company in 1990 and then re-incorporated in the state of Delaware before the company went public in 1997 on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol RMBS.
In the 1990s, Rambus was a high-speed interface technology development and marketing company that invented 600 MHz interface technology, which solved memory bottleneck issues faced by system designers. Rambus's technology was based on a very high speed, chip-to-chip interface that was incorporated on dynamic random-access-memory (DRAM) components, processors and controllers, which achieved performance rates over ten times faster than conventional DRAMs. Rambus's RDRAM transferred data at 600 MHz over a narrow byte-wide Rambus Channel to Rambus-compatible Integrated Circuits (ICs).
Described as a packet-oriented bus, said to be based on the system bus of the MIPS RC6280 server and developed by "key participants in the design" of that system, Rambus replaced the multiplexed addresses and control signals of conventional RAM by information in packets transmitted over a data channel. The bus as implemented by Toshiba for 4 Mbit dynamic RAM in 1993 ran at 250 MHz.
Rambus's interface was an open standard, accessible to all semiconductor companies, such as Intel. Rambus provided companies who licensed its technology a full range of reference designs and engineering services. Rambus's interface technology was broadly licensed to leading DRAM, ASIC and PC peripheral chipset suppliers in the 1990s. Licensees of Rambus's RDRAM technology included companies such as Creative Labs, Intel, Microsoft, Nintendo, Silicon Graphics, Hitachi, Hyundai, IBM, Molex, Macronix and NEC.
Rambus RDRAM technology was integrated into products such as Nintendo 64, Intel's system memory chipsets for PCs, Creative Labs Graphics Blaster 3D Graphics cards for PCs, workstations manufactured by Silicon Graphics and Microsoft's prototype Talisman 3D graphics chip set.
In 2003, Rambus Incorporated announced that Toshiba Corp. and Elpida Memory Inc. will produce its new memory technology, known as XDR DRAM. The memory technology is capable of running at 3.2 GHz and is said to be faster than any memory technology available in consumer entertainment devices and PCs at the time.
Rambus purchased Cryptography Research on June 6, 2011, for $342.5M. This will enable Rambus Inc. to develop its semiconductor licensing portfolio to include CRI's content protection and security. According to Rambus CEO Harold Hughes, the CRI security technologies would be applied to a variety of products in the company's IP portfolio.
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Rambus derives the majority of its annual revenue by licensing its technologies and 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".
In 2015, Rambus acquired Integrion Microelectronics, a small Toronto-based IP provider of high-speed analog SerDes PHY for an undisclosed amount. Through this acquisition, Rambus opened its first Canadian office and boosted its high-speed serdes IP portfolio offering. On August 17, 2015, Rambus announced the new R+ DDR4 server memory chips RB26 DDR4 RDIMM and RB26 DDR4 LRDIMM. The chipset includes a DDR4 Register Clock Driver and Data Buffer, and it is fully compliant with the JEDEC DDR4.
In 2016, Rambus acquired Semtech's Snowbush IP for US$32.5 million. Snowbush IP provides analog and mixed-signal IP technologies, and will expand Rambus' product offerings. In 2016, Rambus acquired Inphi Memory Interconnect Business, for US$90 million. The acquisition includes all assets of the Inphi Memory Interconnect Business, such as customer contracts, product inventory, supply chain agreements, and intellectual property. On November 2, 2017, Rambus announced partnership with Interac Association and Samsung Canada to assist in enabling Samsung Pay in Canada.
In 2018, Rambus agreed to renew a patent license with Nvidia. Rambus would be sharing its patent portfolio, including those covering serial links and memory controllers, with Nvidia. On December 11, 2019, Rambus HBM2 PHY and Memory Controller IP were announced to be used in Inflame Technology's AI training chip. In 2019, Rambus announced that it will move headquarters from Sunnyvale, California to North San Jose, California.
In 2021, Rambus announced that it started an expedited share buyback program with Deutsche Bank to buy up roughly $100 million in common stock. Rambus also acquired two companies, AnalogX and PLDA, which specialize in physical links for PCIe and CXL protocols. In May 2022, it was announced Rambus had acquired the Montreal-headquartered electronic design company, Hardent. In July 2023, Rambus sold its SerDes and memory interface PHY IP business to Cadence Design Systems for $110 million. In September 2023, it was announced the acquisition had been completed.
From Wikipedia’s article on Rambus, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7