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European Union regulators on Wednesday dropped an antitrust inspection into U.S. memory chip company Rambus Inc. after the company pledged to cap royalty fees for its patents on computer memory chips.

Rambus, based in Los Altos, California, will avoid any EU fines by pledging not to charge any royalties for SDR and DDR chip standards and to bring fees for newer versions of DDR down from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent.

that applies to worldwide sales for new or renewed licenses for five years. The company can be fined up to 10 percent of yearly global turnover whether it doesn’t follow these commitments.

Rambus’ general counsel Thomas Lavelle told the AP that the end of the case was “a big relief.”

He said he didn’t expect a huge difference to future revenues — and the lower fees might even boost new sales by attracting companies to take out licenses for the first day.

“People who have licenses

will presumably keep them and humans who don’t have licenses will determine whether they want to take one out,” he said.

The European Commission in 2007 charged Rambus with monopoly abuse, alleging that the company set “unreasonable” royalties for DRAM patents fraudulently set as industry standards.

Chip manufacturers claimed that Rambus was seeking royalties in the early 1990s even as it took part in industry-wide talks that set standards for chips that were to be made mandatory — giving the company a monopoly by key technology patents.

They claimed Rambus had intentionally withheld info from the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council, or JEDEC, which counted Rambus as a member as it established guidelines for the computer memory industry.

Any company that wants to assemble DRAM, or Dynamic Random Access Memory, has to pay Rambus for the design it developed. The chips are used in personal computers, servers, printers, personal digital assistants and…

Original post by dhiram