We thought that Rambus' legal saga was finally winding down this year, with the cards largely having fallen in Rambus' favor. A jury in California determined that the company's patenting of DDR technology was not done fraudulently, and the DC Court of Appeals has determined that the FTC did not provide sufficient evidentiary support for its intervention in the RAM market. But instead of winding down, Rambus was apparently just warming up. The IP-only memory company has decided to start looking beyond traditional RAM manufacturing companies for further licensing, and has set its sights on graphics giant NVIDIA.

The suit was filed yesterday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and alleges a variety of patent violations by NVIDIA. The allegations focus on the memory controllers used in NVIDIA products, and specifically mention both its chipsets, which use SDR and DDR RAM, and its graphics chips, which use different forms of GDDR. Rambus obviously wants damages from NVIDIA, but the suit also raises the threat of injunctive relief. An injunction against shipping products is the sort of low-probability, high-consequence threat that's typically used to hasten settlements.

Rambus claims that it has been trying to negotiate a royalty agreement for six years, but has gotten nowhere with it. The company also suggest that settling now is a good idea, as things will only get worse. "As NVIDIA advances its product portfolio," general counsel Tom Lavelle said in a statement, "it infringes more and more of our patents."

Now that Rambus has a number of IP litigation victories under its belt, the company has a firmer platform from which to launch further suits. The clearest indication of how important the courts have become for the company may be the fact that its investor relations page has a link for litigation updates. With memory controllers going onboard the CPUs of chips from both Intel and AMD, microprocessor manufacturers may well move into Rambus' litigation crosshairs.