Rambus adds Panasonic to licensee list

Electronic News, March 9, 1998 by Dylan McGrath

Mountain View, Calif.--Panasonic will today reveal it is the latest licensee for concurrent and Direct Rambus memory in both Logic and DRAM products. Panasonic said its first chipsets with Rambus memory will be for image signal processing for consumer products, and Direct RDRAMs are expected to be available from Panasonic by the end of fiscal 1999.

Rambus said Panasonic is the 14th DRAM manufacturer to license its technology. The technology is finding its way into a variety of consumer electronics applications such as video games, digital television, DVD and set-top boxes.

"This in general reflects the high level of technology that is now moving into the consumer electronics market," said Jonathan Cassell, a senior analyst with Dataquest, Inc. "Rambus was conceived for advanced computer applications and now we are seeing it getting its biggest usage out of the consumer market."

"Panasonic is one of the top two consumer products companies in the world," said Subodh Toprani, VP and GM of Rambus' logic products division. "Having them take a license for both logic and DRAM is a validation of our technology in these giant consumer markets. They already have a working digital television, so we definitely see this as a validation of our technology."

Panasonic has shown a digital television featuring chipsets made by another chipmaker, also a Rambus licensee. But now the company will produce its own. Digital television requires high bandwidth for several reasons, including variation of system performance requirements, the raw number of bits, algorithm complexity, aspect ratios, scan format and the inherent cost pressures of the consumer market.

According to Rambus, its technology delivers the highest bandwidth of 600 megabytes per second to 1.6 gigabytes per second. Mr. Cassell, for one, is looking for more consumer electronics products to incorporate Rambus technology in the future. "I would expect that this is just the beginning," he said. "I think we will see several more announcements, particularly in the digital televisions. Traditionally, things such as televisions were sort of like graveyards for older technology. Not so anymore, as we are seeing the move to digital technology, which requires some pretty advanced memory."

According to Dataquest figures, the worldwide semiconductor market value for next-generation devices--defined by the company as digital TVs, cable/set-top boxes, DVD video players, Video CD players and other product---will grow from a little more than $5 billion in 1997 to more than $6 billion this year and more than $8 billion by the year 2000.