RE: [oc] legality of cores?!

["Igor Mohor (uni-mb)" <igor.mohor@uni-mb.si>]

Hi, Jeff.

I'm developing JTAG debug interface. First version is already avaliable at
http://www.opencores.org/cores/DebugInterface/
It will be changed a bit but you can get an impression. Let me hear your
comments.

Regards,
	Igor

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-cores@opencores.org [mailto:owner-cores@opencores.org]On
> Behalf Of Jeffrey Hanoch
> Sent: 31. maj 2001 22:27
> To: cores@opencores.org
> Subject: RE: [oc] legality of cores?!
>
>
> 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
>