RE: [oc] legality of cores?!

[Jeffrey Hanoch <jeff@lowrance.com>]

Hello,

Jim, you ask a good question.  However, I don't believe it is illegal to use
information freely available in order to reverse engineer a processor.  As
long as no inside private information from ARM is used, it should be legal.
AMD obviously makes a clone of the Intel processors and gets away with it.
But it should be checked out as I am not a Lawyer (thank God).

I would be interested in possibly working on a project like this.  I am an
ASIC designer at a consumer electronics company who uses ARM cores.  I have
long thought about doing my own "ARM" core, but one thing that has always
stopped me (besides time) has been figuring out how ARM did the JTAG debug
interface.  Without this feature, it makes development extremely difficult.
This feature is necessary in order to take advantage of all the third party
development tools already on the market.  There are very few people who
would have the resources to throw at creating completely new development
tools.  Things like debuggers and compilers are not a trivial undertaking.

I have very limited experience with verilog.  I am a VHDL guy, but have vast
experience with Design Compiler, FPGA development, and Modeltech's Modelsim
tools.

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Poder [mailto:Jim.Poder@wireless-networks.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 1:01 PM
To: cores@opencores.org
Subject: [oc] legality of cores?!


Hello,

I've read 2 announcements in the past week or so regarding Arm
compatible cores, and was wondering if anyone has any idea as to the
legality of these.  I remember reading a couple of months ago about a
group of students from Malardalen University (Vasteras, Sweden) who
wrote an Arm7 compatible core called BlackARM, but could not release it
publicly due to fear of getting sued by Arm, Inc.  Arm, the company,
makes money solely by licensing their IP (cores), and I would think that
they might not appreciate people writing "clones", but I'm not sure if
it is against any laws.  I'm pretty sure that there aren't any lawyers
in this group (thank God!) but has anyone thought about these types of
issues?  I don't want to ruin anyone's fun by dragging lawyers into the
mix, but I would hate to see anyone spend a lot of time developing a
core only to get run over by Arm's legal team.


jim