MediaG3 (MDGC)

[colemano]

MedisG3's 1T Rand Smartphone:

RAND means:

Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing (RAND) is a term for a type of licensing typically used during standardization processes. The normal case is that when joining the standardization body, companies agree that if they receive any patents on technologies which become essential to the standard then they agree to allow other groups attempting to implement the standard to use those patents and they agree that the charges for those patents shall be reasonable. RAND licenses allow a competitive market to develop between multiple companies making products which implement a standard.

Having created a RAND based standard does mean that the known exclusive rights can be licensed from their right holders at published RAND conditions. If at a later time exclusive rights beyond this will get visible or even claimed, this does not at all mean that those parts will be available under RAND conditions but the requested charges can be rather unreasonable instead. The acting standardisation group often has few options for reacting to this, other than creating a newer version of the standard that works around the parts now known to be problematic (if this is possible at all). For example, see the case of the de facto GIF standard or the JPEG standard, which was severely damaged by suddenly surfacing patents.

The second, more subtle, limitation of RAND licenses in standardisation is that the term does not say anything about the relation of the license to the product cost. With this a right that was found to fit, e.g. into a medical device, can have a rather high price per unit via its published RAND conditions. Now finding a second case, e.g. in a cheap consumer device, will not necessarily change the RAND licensing terms in any way.

Almost all free software licenses are RAND, but a RAND license is not necessarily compatible with free software licenses. If a standards body requires the use of a RAND license, free software developers must check the terms of the specific license chosen by the rights holder in order to determine if the standard may be used in free software. A particular RAND license could be incompatible with free software in several ways, such as requiring licensing fees, only applying to complete implementations of the licensed standard, limiting use to particular fields, or restricting redistribution. Some free software advocates argue that standards bodies should use a different term, such as "uniform fee only" (UFO), because they believe a license that charges for a patent license is inherently non-reasonable, and thus the term RAND is misleading.[1]

One very successful area where RAND is in use is in the GSM and UMTS mobile phone standards where many different manufacturers compete to provide handsets and base stations. This is possible because the systems are based on open standards and because the patents required to implement this are mostly available under RAND terms. This situation is claimed, for example by the 3GPP to lead to strong price competition and lower market prices for this equipment both to consumers and to operators. This compares very well to other standards such as CDMA, where single companies may have almost complete control over particular areas of technology and manufacturing.

In contrast to the situation for GSM, the World Wide Web Consortium considered standardising on RAND principles, but, after considerable resistance from many different sources, abandoned this strategy in order to aim for royalty free licensing.

As the word "reasonable" is absolutely free in interpretation, standards of the RAND type can be used to keep small and mid-sized businesses away from the market. This can easily lead to oligopolies, where few big enterprises share the markets. Customers then have to pay inflated prices and technological and economical progress is decelerated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_Non_Discriminatory_Licensing

And, I think 1T means:

single-transistor storage cell (bit cell)