Siemens Mobile and Huawei Technologies have formed a 51:49 joint venture to push 3G/TD-CDMA technology in China.
The companies are contributing $100m, with Siemens putting 200 employees on the project, and Huawei 100. Huawei will take the main responsibility for marketing the joint venture’s products in China. The joint venture aims to participate in the official trials of the technology in China later this year.
Beijing-based Huawei is well experienced in joint ventures. Last year it formed a far-reaching joint venture with 3Com, with the companies pooling their enterprise networking efforts.
In other news, Rambus is taking anti-trust action over the memory industry’s response to the introduction of its RDRAM standard in the 1990s.
The Los Alto, California-based silicon IP developer said in its latest 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, that it could take action as early as the next quarter.
In the filing, it said it was evaluating what antitrust or other remedies Rambus may pursue based on evidence indicating that there were concerted efforts in the mid-to-late nineties to deter innovation in the DRAM market and to deter market acceptance of Rambus’s RDRAM product.
It added, however, that no final decision had been taken on whether to follow the anti-trust path.
Rambus’s role in the setting of memory standards in the 1990s and its subsequent introduction of its RDRAM standard have been a bone of contention in the DRAM market for years.
Rambus launched litigation against a number of memory vendors in 2000, claiming their SDRAM products infringed its patents. While some settled with Rambus, others, notably Infineon Technologies, counter-claimed that Rambus had participated in the JEDEC standards body, without revealing that it had patented technology it submitted to the group. Litigation is ongoing.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
