High-speed memory chip interface technology provider Rambus Inc is continuing on its roll of success following the licensing of its technology to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. The Japanese company plans to use the technology to increase the speed of data exchange between semiconductors, which it hopes will result in the development of cutting edge memory and logic chips for consumer products. The company will use the technology to make Image Signal Processing chipsets which it hopes to start manufacturing by the end of its 1999 financial year. Matsushita hopes it will be able to produce DRAMs capable of transferring data with speeds up to 1.6Gb a second. There are now 13 Dynamic Random Access Memory chip suppliers using the Rambus technology, which is growing rapidly in popularity. NEC signed up last year to use the Rambus technology in an embedded RISC chip (CI No 3,243), shortly after clinching deals with Micron Electronics Inc and Gateway 2000 Inc (CI No 3,210). The Mountain View, California company reported year end net income of $2.0m, or $0.09 per share, on revenue up 131% at $26m, against losses of $4.4m last year (CI No 3,268).
