Basis of Presentation

3 Months Ended

Mar. 31, 2016

Organization, Consolidation and Presentation of Financial Statements [Abstract]

Basis of Presentation

Basis of Presentation

The accompanying unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements include the accounts of Rambus Inc. (“Rambus” or the “Company”) and its wholly-owned subsidiaries. All intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated in the accompanying unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements. Investments in entities with less than 20% ownership or in which the Company does not have the ability to significantly influence the operations of the investee are being accounted for using the cost method and are included in other assets.

In the opinion of management, the unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements include all adjustments (consisting only of normal recurring items) necessary to state fairly the financial position and results of operations for each interim period presented. Interim results are not necessarily indicative of results for a full year.

The unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) applicable to interim financial information. Certain information and Note disclosures included in the financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles have been omitted in these interim statements pursuant to such SEC rules and regulations. The information included in this Form 10-Q should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and notes thereto in Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015.

Operating Segment Definitions

Operating segments are based upon Rambus' internal organization structure, the manner in which its operations are managed, the criteria used by its Chief Operating Decision Maker ("CODM") to evaluate segment performance and availability of separate financial information regularly reviewed for resource allocation and performance assessment.

The Company determined its CODM to be the Chief Executive Officer and determined its operating segments to be: (1) Memory and Interface Division ("MID"), which focuses on the design, development and licensing of technology that is related to memory and interfaces; (2) Cryptography Research Division ("CRD"), which focuses on the design, development and licensing of technologies for chip and system security and anti-counterfeiting; (3) Emerging Solutions Division ("ESD"), which includes the computational sensing and imaging group along with the development efforts in the area of emerging technologies; and (4) Lighting and Display Technologies ("LDT"), which focuses on the design, development and licensing of technologies for lighting.

For the three months ended March 31, 2016, only MID and CRD were reportable segments as each of them met the quantitative thresholds for disclosure as a reportable segment. The results of the remaining other operating segments were shown under “Other.”

Reclassifications

Certain prior periods' amounts were reclassified to conform to the current year’s presentation. None of these reclassifications had an impact on reported net income for any of the periods presented. Refer to Note 8 "Convertible Notes" for details.