Further delays by the International Trade Commission panel tasked with resolving a two-year patent battle between Rambus and Nvidia underscore how difficult it is to determine cases involving highly technical IP – and also why the rules need changing.

The stakes are so high, when Samsung settled with Rambus in January, it agreed to pay $700 million in cash over five years – and buy a big stake in Rambus.  Now the ITC wants to know how that deal might affect the rest of the case.

That’s reasonable, I suppose, but in the meantime, electronics designers face the no-win choice of either designing in chips known to be part of a patent dispute, or finding something (probably) less desirable as replacement.

And who do you think pays in the end?