RE: [oc] legality of cores?!

[Richard Herveille <richard@asics.ws>]

At 03:27 PM 5/31/01 -0500, you wrote:
>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 agree. But look at the job that's being done for the OR1K processor. The 
JTAG debugger is finished and from what I've heard it is very good. 
Software for the processor (debugger/simulator) is on the way. Since it is 
all open-source it should be pretty easy to adapt it for the ARM-alike core.

Richard

>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