A company called Rambus which designs high-speed memory chips, claims that NVIDIA has violated five of their patents relating to dynamic-random access memory or DRAM. This also relates to memory controllers, which can be found on either graphics cards or motherboards, and NVIDIA has a business of selling both.
A U.S. International Trade Commission judge in Washington has just ruled that NVIDIA is violating three of the patents being claimed by Rambus, and mentioned that the other two are invalid. This brings us a rather interesting situation, because after the full commission has finished reviewing the case put forth by Rambus against NVIDIA and it is found that there has indeed been a patent violation, products using NVIDIA graphics cards or chipsets may be banned from import for a period of time.
This directly affects netbooks using NVIDIA's Ion graphics (like the HP Mini 311 netbook, for example) and even forthcoming products with Tegra running inside (such as those planned by Asus). NVIDIA's GeForce, Quadro, nForce, and Tesla lines are also being targeted by the complaint.
NVIDIA has commented through their general counsel that they are "going to fight this," and take things "as far as we have to take it," but if they lose, it's looks like it's going to have a huge effect on their business and definitely won't help their cause to catch up with AMD in the mainstream/high-end graphics department.
Via Business Week
A post from the Asus Eee PC blog.
Rambus wins over NVIDIA in patent dispute, could result in HP and Asus netbook ban
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