Rambus takes over Unity Semiconductor

The patent troll Rambus has made a successful takeover on Unity Semiconductor for a grand total of $35 million. As part of the deal Unity will fully merge with Rambus and all staff will continue to work except for a different company name. Rambus hopes to develop their products by acquiring Unity who are a company that are specialising in the next generation of non-volatile flash memory chips. Interestingly Unity possesses 147 US patents on various technologies which span device, process, design and system application inventions.

The full statement from Rambus is as follows:

Rambus today announced it has acquired privately-held Unity Semiconductor, an innovative memory technology company for an aggregate of $35 million in cash. As part of this acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue developing innovations and solutions for next-generation non-volatile memory. This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus’ breakthrough memory technologies and will open up new markets for licensing. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the acquisition and it has closed.

“At Rambus, we are creating disruptive technologies to enable future electronic products,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president and general manager of the Semiconductor Business Group at Rambus. “With the addition of Unity, we can develop non-volatile memory solutions that will advance semiconductor scaling beyond the limits of today’s NAND technology. This will enable new memory architectures that help meet ever-increasing consumer demands.”

“Rambus provides our team the perfect environment to continue the technology development of non-volatile memory cells and architectures,” said David Eggleston, president and chief executive officer at Unity Semiconductor. “Our comprehensive set of design, process and device solutions will complement Rambus’ existing strong technology portfolio and system capabilities.”

Unity has developed a novel solid state memory technology intended to replace NAND in the growing non-volatile memory market. With nine years of development history, Unity’s memory technology, CMOx, has been designed to accelerate the commercialization of the Terabit generation of non-volatile memories. Devices using CMOx cell technology are expected to achieve higher density, faster performance, lower manufacturing costs and greater data reliability than NAND Flash.

Source: Press Release