Hynix Semiconductor Inc., Micron Technology Inc. and Nanya Technology Corp. asked a federal judge in California to delay a patent-infringement trial scheduled for May 2 over claims brought by Rambus Inc.

Jared Bobrow, a lawyer representing the memory-chip makers, said in a letter Wednesday to U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte in San Jose, California, that the trial should be taken “off calendar” or postponed as the companies await decisions in related cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

“With only two months until the trial date, there is still no decision from the Federal Circuit and no clarity as to whether a trial will be necessary or what its scope will be,” Bobrow wrote. “Even if a decision issued today, there would not be sufficient time to prepare for a trial starting in two months.”

Rambus, the Sunnyvale, California-based designer of high- speed computer-memory chips, has sued companies that refused to license its patents, including Ichon, South Korea-based Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory-chip maker; Boise, Idaho-based Micron; and Taoyuan, Taiwan-based Nanya.

Rambus’s patent claims cover DRAM chips, or dynamic random access memory. The cases at issue in Bobrow’s letter concern DDR2, or double rate 2 memory chips. Whyte set the May 2 trial date anticipating the appeals court in Washington would already have issued rulings, according to Bobrow’s letter. 

(Bloomberg)