Re: Re: My Take on Competition

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Michael Perelman wrote:

> DRAM is not protected by IP.  It is regarded as a commodity, like wheat or
> soybeans.  A processor chip is protected.

This may be changing, though -- new and more complex types of DRAM, like
Rambus' RDRAM, are indeed protected by IP agreements. Toshiba just
paid through the nose to license design tech from Rambus, and
Rambus is also suing Hitachi over IP violations.

All of which has thoroughly pissed off the biggest DRAM producers around,
namely the Taiwanese foundry firms, who are pushing commodity-based SDRAM
instead. So maybe there's a kind of, well, dialectic between IP and non-IP
here.

-- Dennis