Under the agreement, Rambus (Los Altos, Calif.) will get access to Intel's interface technology, including Infiniband-related patents, while Intel will be able to use all of Rambus' patented intellectual property, including the synchronous interface patents that have proved so contentious over the past two years in various court battles.

Rambus president Dave Mooring said the agreement would provide Intel with access to Rambus' patents related to double-data-rate technology, and those pertaining to chip-to-chip interfaces, backplanes and communications technology.

In a conference call Monday, Rambus chief financial officer Bob Eulau said the agreement would increase Rambus' revenue in the current quarter by about $10 million, and that the agreement with Intel calls for fixed royalty payments each quarter for the next five years.

Avo Kanadjian, vice president of marketing at Rambus, said the agreement may add about $8 million to $10 million in quarterly revenues for Rambus.

The agreement supercedes a 1996 contract between the two companies that many said included restrictions on Intel's ability to field a chip set that would support DDR-SDRAMs.

As part of the agreement, Intel said it would return 4 million warrants that would have enabled Intel to buy Rambus stock at a price of $2.50 per share. Rambus was trading in the $6-to-$7 per share range Monday, down from about $87 a year ago.

If Intel had exercised the warrants it would have diluted Rambus stock somewhat, a Rambus spokesman said. Eulau called Intel's decision "more strategic than financial."

Kanadjian said the agreement indicates that Rambus and Intel will continue to work together to develop faster versions of the Rambus channel, which currently supports a peak memory bandwidth of 1.6 Gbytes per second. Intel's 850 chip set supports a dual-channel architecture, delivering a peak of 3.2 Gbytes/s from two Rambus DRAM modules.

Rambus had planned to announce its next-generation technology, called Yellowstone, at a Rambus Developer Forum next week. However, that event has been postponed and will now take place Oct. 22-23 at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

Prior to the jump to the Yellowstone technology, which is believed to support a quad data pump, Rambus and Intel are working with PC and motherboard OEMs to speed up existing Rambus technology, Kanadjian said.

"Just as the PC OEMs worked to speed up the modules that used fast-page-mode DRAMs, widening the interface to the modules from 8-bit to 32-bit on up to 64-bits, we are doing a similar thing with the Rambus technology. We are moving to faster speed bins, from 800 Mbits per second per pin today to 1,066 and then to 1,200. In combination with that, the modules will move from the 16-bit-wide interface to wider interfaces," Kanadjian said.

Boosting the bandwidth between the RDRAMs and Intel's Pentium 4 processor depends in part on the PC OEMs and motherboard companies supporting new modules. The unused center pins on the RDRAM modules that ship today can be put to use to support the wider interfaces, thus keeping the engineering changes to a minimum, Kanadjian said.