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European Union regulators Friday confirmed they have started a settlement procedure with U.S.-based Rambus Inc. (RMBS) over an alleged antitrust violation.

As part of the proposed settlement, Rambus has offered royalty cuts for five years for its chip technology customers, the European Commission said.

If a settlement is reached, it will conclude the antitrust case without a fine, while Rambus could continue to disagree with the European regulators' preliminary findings that Rambus had committed a "patent ambush" by participating in a technology standards setting body and not fully disclosing that it held patents on aspects of the standard that the body subsequently adopted.

Rambus holds some key patents in Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM, which is used to temporarily store data in products such as PCs and smart phones.

The company has offered to cut the royalty rates on the newer DRAM memory chips to 1.5% a unit globally, while older generations of the chips can be produced for free, as long as they amount to under 10% of the total production, the commission said.

According to Rambus, the global production of the older generation of DRAM chips amounted to around 8% in 2008.

Royalty rates on most memory controllers, which is a smaller chip designed to read the DRAM chips, will be levied at 2.65% until the end of April 2010, after which it will fall to 2%, the commission said.

"To prospective licensees this will provide clarity of price, and it's probably lower than what they had seen in the past," said Thomas Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus.

The commission is asking for interested parties to comment on the licensing changes offered by Rambus within the next month, after which the European antitrust watchdog will decide whether or not to drop the charges.

This will give companies such as Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and Samsung (000830.SE), which are still in litigation with Rambus over the patent charges, to say whether they find the new royalty levels reasonable.

"It was a reasonable compromise," Lavelle added.

-By Peppi Kiviniemi, Dow Jones Newswires; +32 (0)2 741 1 483; peppi.kiviniemi@dowjones.com