Dedicated to making data faster and safer, Rambus creates innovative hardware,
software and services that drive technology advancements from the data center
to the mobile edge. Our architecture licenses, IP cores, chips, software, and
services span memory and interfaces, security, and emerging technologies to
positively impact the modern world. We collaborate with the industry, partnering
with leading chip and system designers, foundries, and service providers. Integrated
into a wide array of devices and systems, our products power and secure diverse
applications, including Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT) security, mobile
payments, and smart ticketing.
Building upon the foundation of technologies for memory, SerDes and other chip
interfaces, we have expanded our portfolio of inventions and solutions to address
chip and system security, mobile payments and smart ticketing. We intend to
continue our growth into new technology fields, consistent with our mission
to create value through our innovations and to make those technologies available
through the shipment of products, the delivery of services, and licensing business
models. Key to our efforts is continuing to hire and retain world-class inventors,
scientists and engineers to lead the development and deployment of inventions
and technology solutions for our fields of focus.
Our inventions and technology solutions are offered to our customers through
patent, technology, software and IP core licenses, as well as product sales
and services. Today, our primary source of revenue is derived from patent licenses,
through which we provide our customers a license to use a certain portion of
our broad portfolio of patented inventions.
Our strategy is to continue to augment our patent license business model to
provide additional technology, products and services while creating and leveraging
strategic synergies to increase revenue. In support of our strategy, Rambus
has transitioned to focus on two key high-growth markets - the data center and
the mobile edge - with an approach and product roadmap that leverage our core
competencies and supplement with ingredient components to both differentiate
and accelerate our position in complementary markets.
We bolstered our offerings in these markets in 2016 through the acquisition
and integration of four businesses in the fields of mobile payments, smart ticketing,
memory buffer chips and SerDes IP cores. In 2017, we extended the product and
service portfolio in our Security division with the launch of our Host Card
Emulation (HCE) Ticket Wallet Service and white label mobile application, the
Unified Payment Platform, bringing bank-level security to retail “scan-and-go”
and the CrytpoManager IoT Security Service, protecting and monitoring IoT endpoints.
We believe these businesses complement our security division by allowing us
to extend its foundational security technology to offer differentiated, value-added
security solutions to its customers.
In addition, the Memory and Interface division augmented its suite of IP Cores
with the announcement of 56G SerDes and High Bandwidth Memory Gen2 (HBM2) PHYs
and grew the Chips catalog with the launch of the DDR4 non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM)
buffer chip and our server DIMM chipset expected for next-generation DDR5. We
believe these products strengthen our market position for memory buffer chips
and enhance our SerDes and IP offerings enabling us to better address the needs
of the server, networking and data center market.
Organization
We have organized our business into four operational units:
Memory and Interfaces (MID)
Security (RSD)
Emerging Solutions (ESD)
Lighting (RLD)
The Rambus Memory and Interfaces Division develops products and services that
solve the power, performance, and capacity challenges of the communications
and data center computing markets. Rambus standards-compatible memory and SerDes
solutions include chips, architectures, memory and SerDes interface IP Cores,
IP validation tools, and system and IC design services. Developed through our
system-aware design methodology, Rambus products deliver improved time-to-market
and first-time-right quality.
As data rates continue to rise to meet that growing demands for faster data
delivery, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain signal integrity and
power efficiency at the speeds required to support more powerful, multi-core
processors. To address these challenges and enable the continued improvement
of electronics systems, ongoing innovation is required. The many contributions
and patented innovations developed by Rambus scientists and engineers have been,
and continue to be, critical in addressing some of the most difficult chip and
system challenges. The foundations of MID are world-class memory architectures
and high-performance SerDes technologies that are brought to market through
three main business initiatives: (1) patent licensing; (2) silicon IP core licensing;
and (3) chipsets.
Patent Licensing
Our traditional patent licensing program remains our primary source of revenue.
Our patent licenses provide our customers a license to use a certain portion
of our portfolio of patented inventions in the customer’s own digital
electronics products, systems or services. The licenses may also define the
specific field of use where our customers may use or employ our inventions in
their products. License agreements are structured with fixed, variable or a
hybrid of fixed and variable royalty payments over certain periods ranging up
to ten years. Leading consumer product, industrial, semiconductor and system
companies such as AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Freescale, Fujitsu, GE, IBM, Intel,
LSI, Micron, Nanya, NVIDIA, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Renesas, Samsung, SK hynix,
STMicroelectronics, Toshiba, Western Digital, Winbond and Xilinx have licensed
our patents for use in their own products. The vast majority of our patents
were secured through our internal research and development efforts across all
of our business units.
Silicon IP Core Licensing
Our IP core licensing program offers a suite of high-speed memory and SerDes
PHY solutions designed to meet the growing performance needs of data center
and networking. Due to the complex nature of implementing our technologies,
we provide engineering services under certain of these licenses to help our
customers successfully integrate our technology solutions into their semiconductor
and system products. Licensees may also receive, in addition to their license
agreements, patent licenses as necessary to implement the technology in their
products with specific rights and restrictions to the applicable patents elaborated
in their individual contracts. Our solutions are designed into systems bought
by OEMs. We license both directly to ASIC design houses and semiconductor foundries
that, in turn, sell to OEMs, or to OEMs directly.
Chip Sets
Made for high speed, reliability and power efficiency, our DDR memory buffer
chipsets for RDIMM, LRDIMM and NVDIMM server modules deliver top-of-the-line
performance and capacity for the next wave of enterprise and data center servers.
Rambus offers DDR3 and DDR4 server DIMM chipsets to enable increased memory
capacity, while maintaining peak performance for data-intensive work loads.
In the third quarter of 2017, we announced a silicon-proven server DIMM buffer
chipset capable of achieving the speeds expected for next-generation DDR5.
We sell our semiconductor products directly and indirectly to module manufacturers
and OEMs worldwide through multiple channels, including our direct sales force
and distributors. We operate direct sales offices in the United States, Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, China, and employ sales personnel that cover our direct customers
and manage our channel partners.
We operate a fabless business model and use third-party foundries and assembly
and test manufacturing contractors to manufacture, assemble and test our semiconductor
products. We also inspect and test parts in our U.S. based facilities. This
outsourced manufacturing approach allows us to focus our resources on the design,
sale and marketing of our products. Outsourcing also allows us the flexibility
needed to respond to new market opportunities, simplifies our operations and
significantly reduces our capital requirements.
Security
Rambus Security is dedicated to providing a secure foundation for a connected
world. Our innovative solutions span areas including tamper-resistant electronic
devices and systems, network security, mobile payment, smart ticketing and trusted
transaction services. Rambus foundational technologies protect a substantial
amount of licensed products annually, providing secure access to data and creating
an economy of digital trust between our customers and their customer base.
Security challenges are increasingly prevalent in a multitude of industries,
including high-growth sectors such as mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), automotive
and the data center, providing a variety of opportunities for our security technologies
and services. We believe robust security starts with the design of the SoC and
continues through the manufacturing supply chain to end-user applications. In
line with this thinking, RSD offers a suite of products and services from DPA
countermeasures and cores to our CryptoManager™ Platform, mobile payments
and smart ticketing.
DPA Countermeasures and Cores
We own a portfolio of patented inventions and technology solutions that are
needed for creating secure tamper-resistant electronic devices and systems.
These patented DPA countermeasures are critical in protecting devices against
side channel attacks such as differential power analysis, which involve monitoring
the variations in power consumption or electromagnetic emissions of a device.
In addition, our hardware-based cores provide a robust hardware-based solution
to protect electronics systems from side-channel attacks, counterfeiting, piracy,
and other forms of attack.
For DPA countermeasures, our business model is to provide a combination of
patent licenses, technology, consulting services (training, evaluation, and
design), and test equipment as well as DPA resistant cores and software libraries.
We are recognized worldwide for our expertise in this area, and our strategy
is to strengthen our offering beyond stand-alone patent licensing. We discovered
the existence of SPA and DPA vulnerabilities in the 1990s, and patented the
fundamental techniques for preventing against this method of attack. DPA protections
are a critical security ingredient in tamper-resistant products, and are important
or required for a broad range of applications and devices (including smart cards,
mobile devices, FPGAs, government/defense applications, consumer set-top boxes,
postage meters and security tokens).
In addition to the DPA countermeasures portfolio, we have developed technologies,
expertise, advanced designs, and development tools for building highly secure
cryptographic semiconductor cores. We have successfully deployed our semiconductor
cores in two primary application areas where effective security is valued and
paid for by customers: content protection and anti-counterfeiting.
CryptoManager Platform
As the amount of valuable data stored and communicated across devices continues
to grow in the mobile, automotive and IoT segments, the need for robust security
services is becoming increasingly necessary. Robust security starts with the
design of the SoC and continues with the manufacturing supply chain. The Rambus
CryptoManager Platform includes a hardware root of trust, infrastructure, software
and hosted security services, capable of supporting a variety of configurations
via a hardware core or secure software, to provide a scalable and flexible security
solution for chip-to-cloud-to-crowd security.
The CryptoManager platform provides chip and device companies with an advanced
hardware root-of-trust for their SoCs, as well as an Infrastructure Suite for
end-to-end security throughout the SoC design and manufacturing process. The
CryptoManager platform has been developed with a services-based architecture
that enables a secure, two-way communication channel across the manufacturing
stages. This extensible solution is built on a foundation that simplifies, automates,
and reduces costs for global enterprise IT, manufacturing, and operations functions.
The platform is designed to support the enablement of in-field provisioning
and hosted security services.
Mobile Payments
NFC-based mobile payments offer many advantages to consumers, retailers and
financial institutions alike. For consumers, mobile wallets provide a convenient,
“tap-and-go” frictionless commerce experience, seamlessly integrating
credit cards, loyalty points and gift cards, while leveraging enhanced security
features like multi-factor authentication and biometrics. For retailers, mobile
wallets offer businesses the ability to engage users with an immersive, “in-app”
experience that bridges the gap from digital to physical with profile-based
shopping to offer customized recommendations and coupons to customers. Finally,
for banks and retailers, mobile wallets enhance protection from fraud and greater
customer engagement and loyalty.
Our technology adapts to any mobile payments ecosystem - whether card credentials
are stored on the device or in the cloud using host card emulation - and ensures
security through tokenization. With our software, customers can fulfill the
role of a token service provider, securing transactions by removing vulnerable
card data from the payment network. Our mobile payment solutions are offered
to financial institutions and retailers through software license agreements.
Smart Ticketing
Smart ticketing is changing the way people travel by bringing greater convenience
and security to travelers and transport operators alike. Through the use of
smart cards and smart phones, travelers can download and store their tickets
electronically, eliminating the need for ticket vending machines and paper tickets,
enabling users to simply tap their smart card or device on a gate or validator
to access their travel. Our smart ticketing technology combines back-office
processing and analytics systems with web portals, smart cards and mobile applications
to deliver comprehensive solutions to transport operators and local authorities.
Data analytics enable improved profitability and optimization of smart transport
schemes through access to real-world travel data, with easy management of transaction
data to ensure accurate reimbursements. ITSO certified and interoperable with
existing transport providers, our smart ticketing solutions are easy to integrate
across multiple modes of travel, simplifying customer journeys at lower cost.
Currently, our smart ticketing solutions are primarily offered to public transit
authorities in the United Kingdom and we are working to expand our offerings
into the broader international markets