They stole what? Rambus designed their original syncronous rdram circa 1990. Jedec designed nothing. And of course Rambus get royalties from all DDRx versions sold today as they are clearly just different implementations of their memory design. Jedec tried to stole all Rambus patents and implement them one by one for free but failed.
And drdram from late nineties is about same as we got now as DDR3. Similar data rates and address signals are routed similarly from mb to dimm itself unlike older sdram-variants where address channel stays at mb, clearly there was some real geniuses at Rambus and what they implement was what everybody have to do with higher frequencies. Remember that we got similar speed memory what we use now fifteen years ago thanks to Rambus but somehow we settled down to slower memory types for decades, are we stupid or is there some big money to make decisions for us......
Well for #1, the big players settled. That isn't "guilt." They simply didn't want to deal with the lawsuit happy Rambus. In May of 01 they were found guilty of fraud for claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR and all infringement cases were dismissed against the memory manufactures.
Jan 05 they had their case against Infineon dismissed. Infineon decided it was cheaper to just settle than go through another multiyear case and appeals.
Jul 07, EU launched antitrust investigations against Rambus because they considered Rambus deceptive. They declared it "patent ambush" and it is still pending.
Nov 2011 Rambus lost its case against Micron and Hynix
Jan 2012, USPTO overturned one of their 3 key patents that were already used to win litigation previously.
FTC brought Anti-trust actions against Rambus that was thrown out and brought back on appeal.
Sound like your typical patent troll. However the EU and the FTC ended up setting their royalty limit to 1.5% for 5 years back in 2007 and was then set as low as .25 for SDRAM and .5% for DDR. The fact that the royalties are so tiny, generally indicates to me at least that they didn't really add much to it.
Also while RD-RAM's theoretical data rate was higher than DDR, it was crippled by the fact that it wasn't needed by the processor and the poor latency (45ns + additional time for each additional chip in the chain).