Stolen designs

I once cloned (different design, functionally equivalent) a LeCroy product, at the request of one of their customers, and Walter got fairly annoyed. Next bid, they cut their price in half, so the customer disqualified them "on technical grounds"!

And Scientific Instruments cloned one of my cryogenic signal conditioners, but didn't do a good enough job to take much of our sales away.

In niche markets like mine, it doesn't make sense for a company to clone somebody else's product just so that they can start a price war for half of a small market, so we pretty much try to keep out of one another's way.

I hear that AMD might have once cloned somebody's CPU architecture.

John

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 13:32:09 -0500, "Brian" Gave us:

You're an idiot.

I've seen one case where the PCB traces were in exactly the same place and one where sections of the schematic were obviously lifted.

In neither case did the copy cat gain much. They were late into the market.

In article , John Larkin wrote: [...]

The way I heard it, they bought the rights but there was a disagreement about just what the rights were that they bought.

IIRC, someone in Japan was involved too.

AMD were second source of the 8086. They did a technology exchange with INTEL. INTEL put up the architecture, AMD thier process technology.

They later found out that INTEL were working on the 386 architecture which rendered the 286 useless, allthougth INTEL had no qualms about using AMD process technology, evidently they had better lawyers when the deal was made ;-)

So AMD did thier own 386. Obviously cloning or reverse engineering it would have seen them straight in court. So they emulated the functionality in a clean room process were engineers had to build a simulated logic model using VHDL or something similiar to implement the

When they finally had it all together they "simulated" an 80386 chip, it took two weeks to boot a DOS floppy but it was an incredible engineering feat.

That model was then used as the basis for thier subsequent 80386 designs.

NEC. btw, did not do carbon copies of the INTEL chips but re-engineered them with improved technology that was slightly faster. A bit greyer in the legal area because it was in essence an improved version of the INTEL silicon.

Best story I ever heard was the Russians ripping off the Intel 8080. No one there wanted to take the responsibility for even the slightest change - so they left the Intel logo on it!

Luhan

The Motorola 68000 instruction set was an exact copy of the DEC Vax system.

I almost forgot one. I remember a product that was copied exact, even the pcb was DIGITALLY captured and then used. I had forgotten that one!

Yep, the cleanest instructions set I have ever used. All the registers, all the uses, every which way, all the time. Just the opposite of the Intel designs which looked like they were created by bureaucrats.

Luhan

Well, no. Both are clearly derived from the PDP-11 architecture, with the 68K looking more like a PDP-11 than the VAX. But they are very different; for example, the VAX has 12 general-purpose registers, R0..R11, but the 68K has eight data and eight address registers, D0..D7 and A0..A7.

John

Walter LeCroy apparently thought he invented the nanosecond, and got very upset when anybody else dared to build fast electronics and compete with him. And I stole nothing but the arrangement of the connectors on their front panel: my design was original.

I was struggling to keep my startup company alive after developing a family of modems for Reuters and losing the business because of their internal politics. They were very cool modems, double-conversion superhet FSK using all switched-capacitor filters. A guy from Los Alamos walked into my office and literally threw a LeCroy 4208 on my desk and said "Can you do this? If you can, I'll buy them." What do you think I said?

a) No, I don't think I can design anything that hard

b) No, that would be immoral and you are a Very Bad Man

c) How many do you want?

Harry was pissed because half of the LeCroy units were DOA, it took six months to recycle them for repair (from Switzerland), and then half of *those* came back dead.

Did you invent the 555 timer?

Am I bitching? Shucks, I thought I was happy about the whole affair.

John

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 15:19:27 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Hehehe... Cool Story.

Well, actually, it depnds on if you could eat, I suppose. When I first started my company, I had a job come in. They had me lay out a PCB for a design, with a few items in the right locations to "fit the case". I did it, then ordered all the parts for a run of them. In the mean time, I was looking on the Internet for related devices, just for s**ts (I had more time then). I found the EXACT product on the market, and I mean EXACT except for the layout and 3 parts or so. A bit of snooping, it seemed that the person who came to me was his customer. The guy wanted it a bit cheaper, so he just borrowed the design a bit. I tossed the whole job, even though we had about

That was the only design rip off I have seen in my CM company to date.

John, You are absolutely correct! I designed a 68000 emulator in the middle

Thanks, Dave

ISTR they had a lices to copy the 486 hardware, but not the microcode. So they rewrote that.

The Pentium they were not allowed to copy so they rolled their own.

Thomas

And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 23:15:36 -0500, "Brian" Gave us:

Well, damn! The ten year old putz grows up. Nice to see that you aren't attacking anyone anymore.

On 10 Jun 2006 22:12:22 -0700, "EE123" Gave us:

Pass it this way... :-]