Rambus has lost a long-running antitrust case against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor, with a San Francisco County Superior Court jury rejecting claims that Micron and Hynix violated antitrust laws "by conspiring to prevent Rambus technology from gaining traction in the market and fixing the price of memory chips," the Wall Street Journal reports. Rambus filed the suit back in 2004, and sought nearly $4 billion in damages—which could have been tripled under California law—as well as additional punitive damages, the Journal said.

Rambus used to build RDRAM chips, but now describes itself as a "technology licensing company," meaning it makes money by licensing patents to other companies that build products. Rambus CEO Harold Hughes said "we are reviewing our options for appeal" in a statement posted on the company's website.

Rambus reiterated its allegations that "the defendants illegally conspired to constrain availability of Rambus’ RDRAM and keep its prices unnaturally high relative to its competition, while holding competitive DDR pricing low, in an effort to eliminate Rambus’ RDRAM memory technology from the marketplace. Upon succeeding in eliminating RDRAM as a competitor in the main memory market, the defendants raised the prices of DDR by as much as 500 percent."

Micron CEO Steve Appleton, on the other hand, said in his own statement that "We are very pleased that the jury considered all the evidence at issue in this case and determined that Rambus' allegations against the Company were completely without merit." Micron said it presented evidence in court that "it was design flaws, higher manufacturing costs and other drawbacks associated with RDRAM along with Rambus' business practices that prevented RDRAM from gaining wide acceptance in the market."

The jury ruled against Rambus in a 9-3 vote, rejecting the price-fixing claim as well as another claim that Hynix and Micron obstructed relations between Rambus and Intel in a bid to hurt Rambus' position in the market.