Rambus Inc. v. NVIDIA Corporation was a patent infringement case between Rambus and Nvidia. The case was heard in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Rambus Inc, founded in 1990, is an American technology company that designs, develops and licenses chip interface technologies and architectures that are used in digital electronics products. The company is well known for inventing RDRAM® and for its intellectual property-based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory. NVIDIA, founded in 1993, is an American technology company that manufactures, distributes and designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. In 2008, Rambus Inc, initially filed a complaint accusing NVIDIA Corporation of infringing seventeen Rambus patents. Rambus licenses patents covering technologies that it invents and develops to companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Creative Labs. Since its founding in 1990, Rambus has been awarded, by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, over 1,000 patents on many of the components that make up memory controllers and modern computer processor chips. In this case, starting in July 2008, Rambus argued that NVIDIA's units infringed its patents on SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR and GDDR3 technologies, to name a few. Rambus sought a preliminary injunction and compensation for damages under in addition to an adjudication that NVIDIA has infringed and continues to infringe the Rambus patents. Early on, Rambus dropped two of the seventeen patent infringement claims due to covenant dealings. NVIDIA moved for a stay on the remaining fifteen patents pursuant to . Judge Susan Illston ordered for a stay on nine patents, pending a ruling from the International Trade Commission (ITC) in which Rambus was filing similar patent infringement suits against NVIDIA as well as other related chip and memory manufacturing companies. The request to stay on the remaining six patents was denied. Later on it was settled that the nine patents presented in another ITC case were unenforceable in the case of Micron v. Rambus. In July, 2010, ITC ruled that NVIDIA violated three patents belonging to Rambus. NVIDIA soon signed a license with Rambus while appealing the ITC ruling. Background Rambus Inc. develops new chip technologies, obtains patents for these technologies and subsequently sells licenses on these patents to companies in the memory chip and video card business, such as