Re:The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
by ChuckMcM on Monday April 20, 2015 @11:50PM
(#9412183)
> I'm not sure what ChuckMcM was trying to argue.
If you create a circuit board which has all of the same chips as someone else, if you've changed the layout, you are completely within your rights to sell it as your own and keep all the money.
However, if you copy firmware, then creating a circuit board with the copied firmware is a copyright violation and you can be found guilty of copyright infringement at most of our trading partners.
For folks who built cloned CPU boards with a copyrighted BIOS they re-implemented the BIOS in a clean room to have their own "work alike" version, which then gave them the right to sell their boards.
If however you copy an FPGA bitstream, which is the compiled output of a copyrighted HDL description, you're in violation. But building a 'clean room' implementation of an FPGA bitstream is generally infeasible as it requires you to both know how the manufacturer encodes and encrypts it, and all of the functions of the internal chip.
A really great example of this in action was that the recent flap over "clone" FTDI USB to serial chips, wasn't a clone of the chip at all. Instead the cloners used an ARM M0 CPU with a USB peripheral and a UART peripheral and a bit of code that responded in all of the same ways in which the FTDI chip (which was presumably an ASIC) responded. That 'workalike' implementation was only possible because the set of inputs and outputs for that system are constrained, and the only IP violation was the re-use of FTDI's VID/PID pair. If they had been forced to use a bitstream file for an FPGA they would be liable for up to $30,000 per copy, and jail.
However, if you copy firmware, then creating a circuit board with the copied firmware is a copyright violation and you can be found guilty of copyright infringement at most of our trading partners.
For folks who built cloned CPU boards with a copyrighted BIOS they re-implemented the BIOS in a clean room to have their own "work alike" version, which then gave them the right to sell their boards.
If however you copy an FPGA bitstream, which is the compiled output of a copyrighted HDL description, you're in violation. But building a 'clean room' implementation of an FPGA bitstream is generally infeasible as it requires you to both know how the manufacturer encodes and encrypts it, and all of the functions of the internal chip.
A really great example of this in action was that the recent flap over "clone" FTDI USB to serial chips, wasn't a clone of the chip at all. Instead the cloners used an ARM M0 CPU with a USB peripheral and a UART peripheral and a bit of code that responded in all of the same ways in which the FTDI chip (which was presumably an ASIC) responded. That 'workalike' implementation was only possible because the set of inputs and outputs for that system are constrained, and the only IP violation was the re-use of FTDI's VID/PID pair. If they had been forced to use a bitstream file for an FPGA they would be liable for up to $30,000 per copy, and jail.