Re:Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
by nullc on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @12:01PM
(#23760560)
> I believe freescale currently owns the architecture,
Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.
Re:Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
by webmaven on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @07:32PM
(#23765451)
> > I believe freescale currently owns the architecture,
> Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.
Sure, patents wouldn't be a barrier to clone the design and create an equivalent using the same patented ideas, but copyright still prevents you from copying the design, and will prevent copying significant parts of the design as well.
Re:Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
by colejohnson66 on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:12PM
(#23765731)
In other words: you can rearchitect it from scratch, but you probably can’t extract the die.
Re:Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
by webmaven on Thursday July 09, 2020 @09:37PM
(#23787269)
"Probably" doesn't seem strong enough. I mean, the only thing that would give you any hope of avoiding being sued out of existence leaving nothing but a small greasy spot behind would be obscurity and commercial irrelevance.
Re:Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
by DCKing on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @06:53AM
(#23757797)
Interesting thing to consider. I wonder how actively people want to protect 68k, as not even Freescale/NXP seems to use it anymore.
Shouldn't that already be problematic for the 68k projects in hardware through FPGAs? Apollo already does it and sells hardware, and the MiSTER project also does it by releasing FPGA designs for e.g. the Sega Genesis which has a 68k processor. Is it a different story if you embed 68k in an ASIC?
I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.