Rambus shares spike 13 percent as trial date firms

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of chip designer Rambus Inc (RMBS.O) spiked as much as 13 percent on Friday as investors grew more confident that a pivotal antitrust case would go to trial as planned.

Rambus has brought an antitrust case against Micron Technology Inc MU.N, Hynix Semiconductor Inc (000660.KS) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS), accusing them of engaging in price-fixing and hurting sales of its RDRAM memory chips, which are used in computers.

The California state-level trial, which could be worth more than $12 billion in damages, is scheduled to kick off in a San Francisco court on September 28.

Rambus investors had worried the trial would be delayed after Micron and the other memory makers asked an appeals court to look at prior rulings on the case ahead of the trial.

The fifth and last of those petitions for a "writ of mandate" was denied by the California 1st District Appellate Court on Thursday night, after the close of the market.

"Now that the last of the remaining of the five writs has been denied, investors are more confident that the antitrust trial will begin on September 28 as previously scheduled," MDC Financial Research CEO Mike Cohen said.

"Everyone's in a too-good-to-be-true mood that the trial's actually going to start after five years. Everyone's been thinking 'what can delay it, what can delay it?'

Cohen owns 1,700 shares of Rambus.

The petitions "could have stopped the trial. That's the significance," said Capstone Investments analyst Jeffrey Schreiner, who does not own Rambus shares.

"Now that the remaining writ is denied, in essence I think that investors see no real impedance to the September 28 trial date," he said.

Samsung and Micron would not comment on the case and Hynix could not immediately be reached.

"We're pleased with the latest development in the price fixing case in San Francisco, and we look forward to the trial beginning at the end of September," Rambus spokeswoman Linda Ashmore said in a statement.

Shares in Los Altos, California-based Rambus rose as high as $17.85, before closing up 12.3 percent at $17.75 on Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Richard Chang)