Toshiba Corp. and Tessera Inc., a leading provider and licenser of chip-scale packaging technology based in San Jose, Calif., said Wednesday they have signed a technology licensing agreement.
Under the agreement, Tessera will be the exclusive licenser of Toshiba's wire-bonded version of Tessera's microBGA chip-scale package.
Based on Tessera's core patents, Toshiba currently incorporates the wire-bonded microBGA package in its main memory products used in personal computers and the new Sony PlayStation2 game console.
This arrangement marks the first step in Tessera's strategy to broadly license and standardize packages that its licensees have developed using Tessera's patent portfolio, the companies said.
"Toshiba licensed Tessera's intellectual property and used it to develop an innovative derivative of our microBGA CSP," said Bruce McWilliams, president and chief executive officer of Tessera.
"Through our new relationship, Tessera will enable Toshiba to leverage its R&D (research and development) investment by licensing the wire-bonded microBGA technology to Tessera's broad, worldwide customer base of semiconductor manufacturers," he added.
NEC chip agreements
NEC Corp. said Wednesday that it has signed licensing agreements on semiconductor memory technologies with Rambus Inc. of the United States.
The accords include the development and marketing of next-generation direct Rambus dynamic random access memory (RDRAM), NEC said.
"The next-generation 1,066 MHz Direct RDRAM will deliver a 33 percent frequency improvement," the company said.
over the current 800 MHz Direct RDRAM in main memory applications, and will continue to keep Rambus' memory technology at the forefront of performance in personal computers, workstations, servers and network equipment," NEC said in a press release.