Stolen designs

Most of my products contain an MC68332 uP, and we're still designing new gadgets around it. It's a lovely instruction set, which I always program in assembly. I keep checking with OnSemi about the production status, and they assure me it's good and that they are still soliciting new customers for it. The depletion-load NMOS MC6800 was in production for over 20 years! Meanwhile, Intel has introduced and dumped 10 or 20 generations of embedded products, cancelling some just after samples were available. They just dumped the Xscale stuff, their version of Arm (or Mips? I forget.)

John

Moto invented the 6800. Some of their guys spun off and formed MOS Technology and they cloned the 6800. Moto sued them, so they re-did the instruction set to make the 6502. Woz picked the 6502 for the Apple I because he could get a few samples cheap.

John

The 68K family started in the early 70's and is still going strong. The latest versions are RISC machines (all or mostly all hard-coded), the Coldfire and (I think) Dragonball things. We still use the 68332, with the nice CPU32 core, with cool stuff like a 64/32 hardware divide.

John

Oops, Freescale.

John

The Russians ripped off the B29, right down to the graffiti on some of the electrical panels.

Wow, a whole lot of brain fade going on.

The guys at Motorola who designed the 6800 went off and formed MOS Technology (an affiliate of Sprague according to the old ads). (Chuck Peddle was one name that comes to mind. Who later did the Commodore PET computer, and then the Victor desktop computer).

They (circa 1975)

As a consequence of Motorola going after them for #2, #1 (the 6501) dissappeared, after being on the market for a few months. The not quite pin compatible 6502 kept on going.

The later (didn't really get out there until 1981) 68000 was more of a 32 bit extension of the PDP-11, with two banks of 8 32 bit registers. A much less complex architecture than VAX which had three address instructions and a zillion address modes. The Ultimate CISC, (unless you count the iAPX-432).

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Would an conclusion that Intel is an unreliable partner for embedded projects be true based on this info..?

saw

We were under subcontract to a prime contractor on a US Navy project to produce an embedded display controller on tight schedule and volume constraints. After we got it working, the customer suddenly cancelled out contract and substituted his own design. Subsequent investigation showed that their design included a lot that had been disclosed in design reviews. My lab notebook, design fiels, and contact records became a significant part of the case.

We sued and "won": they agreed not to do it any more, pay us a little money, and send us copies of all their engineering documents related to the project. I don't know if we got the money, but I never saw any of the design documents.

Relax! Just look at your immediate surroundings. You weare clothes designed before Neanderthal times, you boil your morning coffee on fire domesticated before that, your "proud" vehicle moves on wheels invented before Pharaos existed, and so on and on. "What was the question?"

In reality it is rather individual, sometimes it is company assignment, "If 'they can do it' so can (I)we!" and you learn/investigate/steal what was done. As usually it is done on working equipment, and in our proffesion it takes time to have a produced box, your investigation may be reduced to simple admit that copy is not worth the effort and designing from scratch will be faster. Been there, done it. But you and your company have to be rather safe when you declare "Yes, it can be done!" Some times the answer IS "Just do it!" Oh, those times, I still miss them. It was such fun.

Have fun

Stanislaw Slack user from Ulladulla.

At least we can say that there was a point at which they did not care about maintaining a reputation in the embedded market.

What their opinion on the subject today is, I don't know. It doesn't matter to me because a direct lie they told me some years back got them on my bad side and on such things I have a very long memory.

Was that lie stated publicly or in private conversation..? (ie one can prove they lied)

Anyway the x86 instruction set is a hodgepodge compared to m68k. So it doesn't matter too much..

Keith typed in news:// snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzz,

I didn't know that one, but I heard they copied the holes and patches in the fuselage.

It's really strange since they had three B29s to work from. They didn't all have the same graffiti and bullet holes, but I guess the people making parts only had access to one of the originals.

I thought it was four, but could be wrong. NASM's _Air_and_Space_Magazine_ had an article on this a couple of years back. Amazing how inflexible the "engineering" management was.

John Fields typed in news:// snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com,

Intel came out with the 8086 at least 4 years before the IBM PC.

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:55:42 -0400, Keith Gave us:

It was two.

I know about what you said; we are also selling a "niche" product, the replacement to the Victoreen Corotron(TM). Titan was the "big boy" for a while, but they had no clue to thermally couple the neg TC part to the pos TC part, which gave the assembly a thermal hysteresis time constant of about 10 minutes. And they had no way to mass produce them, as their design required "tweaking" of a voltage divider. And..the regulated voltage grossly sagged as the temperature got high. To top it all off, some units fell apart at high temperature. Shoot, we even put a patent on improvements to their design into the public domain. And despite that, their sales have gone down, probably due to NIH syndrome. So it can be a challenge to stay on one's toes with essentially zero competition.

Keith typed in news:// snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzz,

According to the History channel documentary, they had 3, of which they cannibalized one, kept one for intact study, and kept one in flying condition to train their own crews.

At a Moscow air show they flew 4 of them in tandem over the crowd, and the Americans thought it was our planes until the fourth passed.

That documentary also said they had never used synchros before, and that they had the same premature wear problem with some engine parts.

Russia had a backup team to develop the bomb, so if the first team failed they could be shot and replaced. I guess that work atmosphere makes people take orders like "copy the plane" literally.

On the other hand, when they had no choice they did make at least one change. Their sheet metal rolling machines were metric, so there was no way to make 1/16th inch aluminum. Somehow they tapered the thickness from one end of a sheet to the other.