Rambus Reportedly Exploring Sale Possibilities

发布时间：2017-07-11 00:00
作者：Ameya360
来源：Dylan McGrath
阅读量：990

　　Memory technology licensor and chip vendor Rambus Inc. is working with a financial advisor to study options for its sale, according to a report by the Bloomberg news service.

　　No final decisions have been made about selling the company, according to the report, which cites anonymous sources.

　　Rambus declined to comment on the report through a spokesperson.

　　Rambus is a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company with a long history of patent litigation, including successful litigations against many of the largest memory chip vendors in the late 2000s. After years of collecting significant royalties from its double data rate (DDR) technology and earning a reputation as a patent troll, Rambus, which claims more than 2,500 technology patents returned to its roots as a fabless chip vendor in 2015.

　　After two years of unprecedented merger and acquisition activity, consolidation in the semiconductor industry has cooled in 2017. Imagination Technologies plc, a fellow IP licensor, is also exploring the sale of the company in light of losing its top customer, Apple, earlier this year.

（备注：文章来源于网络，信息仅供参考，不代表本网站观点，如有侵权请联系删除！）

上一篇：Memory Prices Drive Samsung's Record Q2 Profit

下一篇：China Makes Two IoT Calls

在线留言询价

相关阅读
Rambus acquires memory technology assets of Diablo Technologies
Trade news

Rambus acquires memory technology assets of Diablo Technologies

　　Rambus Inc. today announced it has acquired the assets of Diablo Technologies to broaden its portfolio in the hybrid DRAM and Flash memory markets. These patented innovations augment the existing Rambus NVDIMM portfolio and complement its high-bandwidth, low-power memory technologies. Specific terms of the deal are not disclosed.　　For over ten years, Diablo Technologies was a pioneer in the development of NVDIMM technologies for high-speed, low-power, and low-latency bridging and switching products targeted at the server and storage markets. Having developed memory buffer and software solutions leveraging an all-Flash memory sub-system, Diablo Technologies enabled an architecture to rewrite the rules of data center performance and economics. Rambus’ investment in these technology areas provide a foundation for integrating existing DRAM and Flash along with emerging memories into advanced hybrid memory systems in the future.　　Expanding emerging memory technology for high memory bandwidth interfaces is key to Rambus’ strategic core business. The company has also been collaborating with IBM to research hybrid memory systems, as announced previously.　　“Adding these breakthrough innovations from Diablo Technologies will continue to grow Rambus’ leadership in non-volatile and hybrid DRAM and Flash memory technologies with foundational patents,” said Kit Rodgers, SVP of Technology Partnerships and Corporate Development, Rambus. “Diablo Technology’s patented innovations were ahead of their time and nicely complement our offerings for existing and new customers.”
2019-01-18 00:00 阅读量：959
Rambus Taps RISC-V for Root of Trust
Trade news

Rambus Taps RISC-V for Root of Trust

　　Rambus announced a security block based on the RISC-V core aimed, in part, to plug the Meltdown/Spectre flawsrevealed earlier this year. The CryptoManager Root of Trust targets use in a wide spectrum of ASICs, microcontrollers, and SoCs in embedded systems.　　Rambus claims that the new block sports several advantages over root-of-trust functions already integrated in most existing embedded processors. It suggested that OEMs should move this fundamental hardware-security function out of mainstream x86 and ARM embedded processors that Spectre/Meltdown showed are vulnerable to side-channel attacks.　　However, an NXP security expert said that the root-of-trust function ideally should be implemented in a standalone chip, a practice that high-security systems use. The trend of integrating the function into larger chips helped save costs, but it was a step backward in security, said Sami Nassar, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at NXP Semiconductors.　　“The security execution environment and the root of trust should be outside the main processor … you don’t want to mix security and general processing,” he said. “It’s not complicated to [isolate the two], and it doesn’t add much cost, but people cut corners, and it’s proven to be a weak model.”　　Rambus argues that its block lets designers at least move the key security functions off of embedded processors that often use speculative execution. Spectre/Meltdown showed that the popular performance-boosting function can leave secure data exposed in caches.　　Nassar countered that highly secure systems generally use standalone root-of-trust chips separately from host processors. Integrated chips are more vulnerable because they share I/O and cache blocks, he said.　　The first mainstream implementations of hardware root-of-trust security defined by the Trusted Computing Group nearly 15 years ago were standalone chips called secure modules. However, over time, major processor and IP vendors such as Intel and ARM subsumed those functions in their chips.　　The big processor and IP vendors argued that their implementations kept secure and open paths separate inside a chip. However, the Spectre/Meltdown attacks showed that the complexity of today’s devices leave room for vulnerabilities that are sometimes not found for years.　　Rambus and others argue that the new block and the RISC-V core that it is based on have advantages over transitional implementations of a root of trust.　　For example, the CryptoManager supports multiple roots, letting processes use the core without exposing keys or secrets to other processes. The Rambus core is fully programmable and sports new levels of protection against side-channel attacks, emulation, reverse-engineering, and other hacks.　　A Rambus security expert was one of the researchers behind the initial papers on Spectre/Meltdown. The company announced last year that it would adopt a RISC-V core from startup SiFive for use in security applications.　　After some initial hiccups, Intel said in March that it now has firmware available to mitigate Spectre/Meltdown flaws in its processors as much as nine years old. It promised that changes in hardware to plug the flaws will emerge in new Xeon and Core chips starting in the second half of this year.　　“The semiconductor industry faced some of its biggest security issues this year with recent vulnerabilities, and the potential to encounter additional security flaws will not go away any time soon as more IoT devices enter the market,” said Abhi Dugar, an IoT security analyst for International Data Corp., speaking in a Rambus press release.　　“To address existing and new threats, establishing trust at the hardware level will be critical, and a secure siloed core can help ensure that this new generation of devices can be protected from security flaws.”
2018-04-17 00:00 阅读量：1115
Rambus Adds Security to RISC-V
Trade news

Rambus Adds Security to RISC-V

　　Startup SiFive announced a new program providing third-party intellectual property blocks for its RISC-V processors. Its first partnership is for security hardware from Rambus.　　Rambus will provide a crypto core optimized to connect to its IoT device management services and run on the SiFive Freedom chips. The Rambus core enables a secure connection, attestation and device monitoring, said Martin Scott, general manager of Rambus’s security group.　　The core is the first member of what SiFive calls DesignShare. “SiFive welcomes everybody to join DesignShare — Rambus is the first of many partners we will be announcing soon,” said Jack Kang, vice president of product and business development at the startup.　　The program aims to deliver IP “at a low or reduced up front cost,” he said. The blocks will not necessarily be based on open source code.　　SiFive officially launched in May its first two cores available on its Web site. Although the RISC-V instruction set is open source, the cores require a one-time licensing fee. SiFive does not charge per-unit royalties.　　SiFive CTO and co-founder Yunsup Lee will give a talk at Hot Chips this week about the company’s products first announced in 2016 as well as the Rambus partnership.　　Earlier this month, SiFive named industry veteran Naveed Sherwani its CEO. Sherwani has helped found nine startups to date including Open Silicon and Brite Semiconductor. He also helped pioneer Intel’s move to a more open EDA platform for its first ASIC service.
2017-08-22 00:00 阅读量：1114
Rambus, Microsoft Heat Up With Cold DRAM
Trade news

Rambus, Microsoft Heat Up With Cold DRAM

　　A community of computer scientists striving to respond to soaring system demand for real-time data processing has just received some good news.　　Rambus revealed Monday (April 17) that the company, in collaboration with Microsoft researchers, will have an early prototype of cryogenic memory in a month, and a more complete one by the end of the year. The new technologies will be essential to data centers, “currently the fastest growing consumer of memory” in the industry, Craig Hampel, chief scientist at Rambus, told EE Times.　　The new memory subsystems will be able to operate below minus?180 °C or minus?292.00 °F or 93.15 kelvin. This will substantially reduce energy consumption and improve the overall performance of a bank of computers deployed in the cloud for massive data processing, he explained.　　Rambus and Microsoft struck a deal in late December, 2015 to pool resources and develop memory systems for next-generation quantum computing.　　Rambus’ announcement on Monday is the first tangible result of the joint efforts. Such cryogenic techniques mark a significant change in DRAM operating temperatures.　　However, during the initial partnership announcement, the two companies did not mention the development of cryogenic DRAM. Instead, they appeared more interested in developing memory systems for next-generation quantum computing. So, how does their latest announcement relate to that?　　Hampel explained that this all fits into a greater strategy to advance systems to superconducting computing and ultimately to quantum computing. Rambus explained that by breaking down the cryogenic systems’ long-term goal for quantum computing in bite size, they have applied the new technologies to prototyping DRAM that can operate below 90 kelvin.　　The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has chosen to consider the field of cryogenics as that involving temperatures below minus?180 °C or minus?292.00 °F or 93.15 kelvin (K).　　Conventional DRAM operates at room temperature – roughly at 350 and 350 K. By cooling down to 90 K, “you bring down the leakage to zero, while achieving higher performance at a much lower temperature,” explained Hampel.　　Once you bring the temperature down to 7 K, that’s when you get into the superconducting domain, he added. “It allows all of the interconnect power to become zero.”　　To get to quantum computing, however, cryogenic memory must “operate at 20 to 40 millikelvin, which is essentially colder than deep space,” said Hampel.　　Thus far, by succeeding in a DRAM prototype that works at colder than 90 K, Rambus is “hopeful,” said Hampel, that this leads to “better DRAM scaling, lowering cost and increasing reliability” in subsystems currently under tremendous thermal stress.　　The goal is a cryogenic memory subsystem in the next two to three years, according to Hampel.　　To get there, the Rambus-Microsoft partnership is still missing a third leg: DRAM and foundry suppliers. Rambus isn’t announcing that today but will soon need to address it.　　In search of new memory architecture　　Looking back on Rambus’ history, Hampel said, “We have always pushed the new memory architecture” in new markets. In the late ’80s to early ’90s, Rambus went after the PC market with its proprietary memory technologies, and ended up entangled in a standards war. Then, by mid-1990s, Rambus shifted focus to the video game console market, getting its RDRAM adopted by Nitendo 64 and Sony’s PlayStation.　　As the growth of PCs and game consoles have slowed and smartphones are getting fragmented, Hampel said, “We approached Microsoft for partnership,” as both companies identified data centers as “the best home for new memory innovation.”
2017-04-17 00:00 阅读量：1001
热门分类
盒子，外壳，机架 电缆，电线 电路保护 连接器，互连器件 开发套件 机电产品 嵌入式解决方案 风扇，热管理 光电元件 其它 无源元件 电源 半导体 传感器，变送器 测试与测量
  • 一周热料
  • 紧缺物料秒杀
型号 品牌 询价
RB751G-40T2R ROHM Semiconductor
MC33074DR2G onsemi
CDZVT2R20B ROHM Semiconductor
BD71847AMWV-E2 ROHM Semiconductor
TL431ACLPR Texas Instruments
型号 品牌 抢购
BU33JA2MNVX-CTL ROHM Semiconductor
ESR03EZPJ151 ROHM Semiconductor
TPS63050YFFR Texas Instruments
IPZ40N04S5L4R8ATMA1 Infineon Technologies
BP3621 ROHM Semiconductor
STM32F429IGT6 STMicroelectronics
热门标签
ROHM
Aavid
Averlogic
开发板
SUSUMU
NXP
PCB
传感器
半导体
原厂授权品牌
更多授权品牌>>
资讯排行榜
  • 周排行榜
  • 月排行榜

相关百科
关于我们
AMEYA360微信服务号 AMEYA360微信服务号
AMEYA360商城(www.ameya360.com)上线于2011年，现 有超过3500家优质供应商，收录600万种产品型号数据，100 多万种元器件库存可供选购，产品覆盖MCU+存储器+电源芯 片+IGBT+MOS管+运放+射频蓝牙+传感器+电阻电容电感+ 连接器等多个领域,平台主营业务涵盖电子元器件现货销售、 BOM配单及提供产品配套资料等，为广大客户提供一站式购 销服务。