Toshiba has renewed a five-year memory licensing agreement with Rambus, providing a plentiful flow of royalty dollars to the litigious company.

The deal is concerned with intellectual property relating to speeding up SDR, DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 memory chip performance, as well as some other DRAM chip types. The royalties will vary with the amount of such memory chips shipped by Toshiba.

Toshiba was an early licensee of Rambus technology and enjoys a far less litigious relationship with the company, compared to other memory fab firms such as Hynix and Micron, which have ongoing lawsuits with Rambus. Nvidia and Samsung caved in to Rambus legal suits last year. Rambus shares have surged in value since the Tosh licensing news broke yesterday. ®