protecting circuit design

There is no total solution, just as others have posted.

When you are manufacturing a specialty product targeted at a very specialized market, more often than not your customers are not going to be interested in pirating your product, simply because they hopefully have larger fish to fry.

The situation is very different if you're selling an electronic product to a maket largely consisting of electronics manufacturers. In this case, lawyers are your best bet.

Harry C.

Be careful not to infer that being first guarantees success. Ask Digital Convergence how they did with their CueCat. And Circuit City with a new DVD format.

First is good in at least two cases:

1) Get in, Skim the early adopters, Get out! Someone made a fortune on pet rocks, IF they got out. Not a good idea to spend a lot of money on infrastructure for a non-sustainable product.

2) You have a sustainable product roadmap, marketing smarts, manufacturing smarts, oh a market, and friends with deep pockets. Be first, stay best, get BIG quick.

For the other 99.999% of us without deep pockets, a disribution channel, a sustainable product roadmap, or the sense to get out while it's hot, being first is over rated. mike

--
Bunch of stuff For Sale and Wanted at the link below.
laptops and parts Test Equipment
4in/400Wout ham linear amp.
Honda CB-125S
400cc Dirt Bike 2003 miles $550
Police Scanner, Color LCD overhead projector
Tek 2465 $800, ham radio, 30pS pulser
Tektronix Concept Books, spot welding head...
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/4710/

Patents give legal protection, up to the point that you spent your last million dollars in the 15 year of continuous litigation. In other words, they are great in theory, but if is contested, or BigStore files an illegal patent and produces mirror clone - then it is BIG BUX time....and BigStore has 1,000 to 10^6 times as much money to $pend in court.

I never assume the converse of any result is true until proved.

The Pet Rock is no basis for an argument. We're discussing "conventional" mainstream products

Your wrong. First is still absolutely number 1. Obviously its not everything, but it is well recognised how important it is. Show me one manager who isn't concerned fundamentally with schedule, I still have the whip marks on my back:-)

To all intents and purposes, all practical commercial product development has as it heart the schedule. This is in recognition of how important it is to get the product out there. Once a brand name gets associated with a particular product, its just about impossible to change that association to another brand. e.g. Coke, Kellogg's, A1 source, McDonalds, Kleenex, this list is endless.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Firstly - I endorse all the posts on this thread - it does indeed come down to just doing it first and doing it better.

But the smarts >> I have designed a simple circuitry to resolve a problem. I want to

Regards, Tony (remove "_" from email address to reply)

Those companies faild, not because someone stole their work (the product), but becuase of a backlash against of their business model or concept.

Sometimes an article doesn't reach an individuals news server in the same order it reachs your server. Sometimes an article is received way later.

I think we're in heated agreement. If you have the muscle (engineering, marketing, sales, manufacturing, finance) to take advantage of being first, then being and staying number one is critical.

But that's not the scenario here. We're talking about a simple product with no barriers to entry higher than sanding the numbers off the ICs.

If you're making a simple product and your business savvy amounts to asking how to do it in an internet newsgroup and you don't have any of the above-mentioned muscle and you dribble it out in production lots of

50 and sell them on the internet, all you're doing is feasibility work for the big guys. They (being number 2) will absolutely take your market away from you with their first batch of 100,000 units through their 5000 distributors. Make a coffee cup with "I was first" on it so you'll have something to remember it by.

If you watch your expenses, you might just make a tidy profit off those first few batches, but you ain't gonna get big and still stay under the radar of the guys who are already big. And those big guys probably already have several product lines supporting a marketing and sales infrastructure that you don't have.

Perhaps I need to state my assumption that a market actually exists and being number one is synonymous with being BIG.

The only way I know to make a successful jump to big time is to shoot the whole wad with investors and big bux. You can probably point to many more failures than successes when trying this. Most directly related to poor market research and an inflated assesment of the market potential. And a belief that being first will make everything OK.

mike

--
Bunch of stuff For Sale and Wanted at the link below.
laptops and parts Test Equipment
4in/400Wout ham linear amp.
Honda CB-125S
400cc Dirt Bike 2003 miles $550
Police Scanner, Color LCD overhead projector
Tek 2465 $800, ham radio, 30pS pulser
Tektronix Concept Books, spot welding head...
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/4710/

I don't think it really works like that in practice. The big guys are often/usually too far removed from reality to keep tabs on the small players untill the small players get way above the noise floor. Then the big guys simply buy the small guys out.

As I noted above, you have to be pretty reasonable sized for the bigger guys to notice at all, imo. What they really care about is are you significantly impacting their existing sales. This was something I truly saw coming when Orcad bought out Microsim/PSpice.

Small guys often go the bigger guys right from day one, they usually don't care. Big guys only care about big markets, not potentially big markets, in practise. That is, they are usually not on he ball enough to know if the smaller product can make the big time. They want proof. It the classic, only those that can prove that they don't need a loan, get a loan.

The only guaranteed way to make a small fortune, is to start with a large one, and lose some of it.

To my knowledge, the accepted success rate is 10%.

Most directly

I don't agree. People always like to blame something/someone for failure. I don't think that anything has to be wrong at all to fail. Its the norm. The key ingredient to any and all success is luck. The real world is far to complicated to be able to make predictions of success. Its all hindsight. As McNally says, the only valid marketing survey, is a signed purchase order.

This is on a par to those daft wallys that think they will make it as a pop star if they really believe in themselves and give it full commitment, partly because of those bigger idiots who have happened to made it, and believe that's what got them there. The reality is that there are far too few slots for the available coins.

The market, whatever it is, cannot absorb all ofv the new products. Everything can be exactly right, but still fail. The pop star case illustrates this well. Maybe out of the 1000000 hopefuls, 10% of them have the basics. The next 10% of them, have some more, looks, ability, etc... the next 10%. say 1000 of them, are all brilliant, handsome/beautiful, great voice, charisma, play 3 instruments, live next door to Simon Cowell, etc, etc but guess what, there only room for 10 this year.

Its a very ingrained view in most that if you don't get success, then there must have been something wrong done. That there is something lacking. The statistics just don't support this view. Given essentially, the same conditions, the inherent uncertainty or randomness of the system, will result in different outcomes. You can build a door, and keep it open, but if the wind don't blow, the rose wont float through it.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Just remembered some other methods used for potted circuitry at places I have worked, to slow down a would-be copier:

Have a surplus of old useless chips (don't we all?)? use them to fill up any spare real estate on the new design.

More seriously, if us>Mantra wrote:

Regards, Tony (remove "_" from email address to reply)

Some of the Xilinx Virtex series FPGAs have a 3-DES encryption option for the configuration data. You enter the key into a battery-backed up key area in the FPGA and then encrypt the configuration ROM with that key. This should slow down the competition. You have to supply a button cell to power the FPGA's key memory when power is off, but TANSTAAFL.

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  Keith

Whereas On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:50:24 +0100, "Fred" scribbled: , I thus relpy:

Or storing essential data in SRAM memory, even having data the program needs to run, that realing aren't related to what the code does. The downside is though, if/when the battery goes flat, the device becomes a paperweight/doorstop/boatanchor, unless you are prpared to revive dead machines.

Whereas On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 22:15:01 +1000, Tony Roe scribbled: , I thus relpy:

Won't stop them from just copying the rom.

the severity of the offense varies

me too, but sometimes you have to thank them all in one post rather than bowing and scraping and posting 100 thank yous. youse... y'all... heh, heh, heh.

brs, mike

BTW, i haven't seen any glaring duplicates in this thread. whatchoo talkin' 'bout?

mike

12 Million according to Don Lancaster. :-)

"top posting" as in snipping out the quotes, right? it has its uses if one is just replying to a single point in a long confusing continuation.

i just reply to whichever poster i intend to be addressing.

and you're right about dupes. i'd rather let the OP know that I agree with another's suggestions, but it can also be done by just replying to the suggestion with a simple "yup" and add to it if i feel it would help. depends, i guess you have to use your best judgement. do i have time to read *all* the posts? i try to scan at least a few before i reply.

if you tell an OP to drop 10V across a 1 ohm, 1 watt resistor, i'll jump in. if i just don't like your idea but there seems to be nothing inherently wrong with it, no.

language barriers can be a prob. twice (thrice?) i've had Helmut take me wrong. his english appears ok and because of that, i forget (not any more) he doesn't understand our (and especially my) sense of humor. friendly jibes... innocent comments meant to be humorous. all you can do is apologize.

i hate it when that happens. then there's the change of heart or, "maybe i shouldn't have reamed him so hard." if you're quick, you can cancel the post before google archives it.

it would and does. eh, groups like this... there's *usually* enough potentially interesting stuff for the group group to stay afloat, but i also like the humor and some of the OT.

unfortunately, we're in the middle of a spam attack and there's a lot of OT thread activity pertaining to that. it's getting old, but some good info has surfaced.

brs, mike

. . .

Very good point from the individual's point of view.

On the other hand there is more to intellectual property laws than just guaranteeing an individual will get rich quick.

The real purpose of patenting is to promote the useful arts. If people DON'T patent potentially worthwhile inventions the incentive of investors and others to promote technology is lost.

You don't patent just to help yourself; you patent to promote the useful arts.

This doesn't mean you should patent every invention, of course.

Besides, everyone wants to see a new invention.

Bret Cahill

EPROM,

If the data or address lines are swapped, the stored data is useless in a standard configuration. It will only stop a rank amateur from copying a design, but in one case, a product was cloned, and the clone swapped the data and address lines around so the firmware was not an exact copy. It was a clone of the old Commodore 1541 disk drive, and the case was thrown out of court because the ROM images not only didn't match, but the code in the Clone ROM was unreadable.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida