Maker Pro
Maker Pro

Stolen designs

D

Don Lancaster

Jan 1, 1970
0
Brian said:
How many of you out here have ever discovered that another company had
stolen your designs? As a CM, I have seen it once, and as a hired gun I saw
it once on a complete product scale (although multiple products copied by
this company). I have seen teardowns done, but not cloned. I wonder how
prevalent this is.
If your designs are any good, they WILL be stolen.
End of story.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
 
D

Don Lancaster

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ken said:
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 one early color organ design of mine, I needed a noncritical resistor
and the only one I had available at home was an oddball 39 K that nobody
ever uses.

An insane number of third praty color organs and psychedelic lighting
and dimmer circuits from others ever since placed a 39K resistor in that
point in the circuit.



--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
 
B

Brian

Jan 1, 1970
0
You probably wouldn't be if someone ripped _you_ off for a front
panel layout, eh?

I'd have to say a functional equivalent isn't a rip off, though. I have seen
medical equipment companies come out with a functional equivalent of a
competetors device, like Vital Signs Monitors, that had very similar layouts
to where things hooked up, etc. They wanted it that way. But the innards
were 100% original (minus OEM module add ons made by a third party). Both
engineered their own system. The second group just wanted the layout to be
similar as it provided no learning curve for end users of the first device.
JMHO, but I could be wrong :(
 
B

Brian

Jan 1, 1970
0
Meanwhile, Intel has introduced and
dumped 10 or 20 generations of embedded products, cancelling some just
after samples were available.

There were a bunch of PowerPC processors that fit this category, several
versions that never made it after samples were sent and designs made around
them.
 
B

Brian

Jan 1, 1970
0
If your designs are any good, they WILL be stolen.
End of story.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

Some of mine are in very inaccessible places and no market to make more. I
LOVE jobs that are one-of-a-kind!

If I had access to some of the competitors gadgets that competed with things
I had designed, maybe I would have seen more. But forking out BIG money just
to see that is not gonna happen. Being a hired gun all that time, I rarely
stayed in the same market area for long. I have never been asked to formally
reverse engineer something and never had time to do it on my own. My usual
contracts were getting something out the door after marketing and
engineering had battled it out too long, fixing "show stoppers", or
designing all new systems.
 
T

Terry Given

Jan 1, 1970
0
Brian said:
Some of mine are in very inaccessible places and no market to make more. I
LOVE jobs that are one-of-a-kind!

If I had access to some of the competitors gadgets that competed with things
I had designed, maybe I would have seen more. But forking out BIG money just
to see that is not gonna happen. Being a hired gun all that time, I rarely
stayed in the same market area for long. I have never been asked to formally
reverse engineer something and never had time to do it on my own. My usual
contracts were getting something out the door after marketing and
engineering had battled it out too long, fixing "show stoppers", or
designing all new systems.

I reverse-engineer stuff all the time. Likewise I collect schematics of
test gear etc. you never know when you might come across an idea worth
stealing :)

more often though, the trick is to figure out the underlying principles
of any "nice" circuit, then apply those principles to your thing.

Cheers
Terry
 
A

Ancient_Hacker

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ro
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 ;-)

I think you're misinformed. Both Intel and AMD admit AMD was a bit
slow on the techonology-transfer to Intel. Not necessarily
preventable.
So AMD did thier own 386.

No, AMD had and has the rights to Intel microcode, all the way to the
latest Pentium instructions. If you look hard enough, Intel admits
this.
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
Piracy is the sincerest form of flattery?

It's not necessarily 'piracy' in the sense of being illegal. I've had
several innovative designs copied, mostly by small garage shops who
could turn an apparent profit by cutting corners on tooling and
copying circuits directly. A couple others were new ideas for new
markets and the functionality was emulated, without being a direct
copy. That's actually more irritating. Oh, and I had an A****n
Instrument guy bitch to me at a trade show about a funcional
equivalent that I'd designed. Sorry, the customer asked for it. Seemed
they'd heard that before (probably because they charged really, really
high prices for something a good instrument design engineer could do
over a coffee, on a paper napkin).

If you publish schematics your designs will be copied whether or not
they are any good.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
---
Hmmm...

"No your honor, I don't really consider that to be stealing. I was
hungry, you see...


Have you ever looked at a Tektronix RM529 and a HP 191 Waveform
Monitor, side by side? Look at the rear panel. the connectors are
placed to make the HP a drop-in replacement for the original RM529. The
early CCU consoles were pre wired, and it would take a lot of time to
slit all the lacing cord and replace the cables to fit a different
footprint.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.


Mostek developed the 6502 as a low cost processor to compete with the
6800 and it was designed by some of the same people who worked on the
6800.

Rockwell and about a dozen other companies were second source for the
6500 series of chips.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.


Make that MOS Technology!


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Brian said:
How many of you out here have ever discovered that another company had
stolen your designs? As a CM, I have seen it once, and as a hired gun I saw
it once on a complete product scale (although multiple products copied by
this company). I have seen teardowns done, but not cloned. I wonder how
prevalent this is.


Did you ever look at the PC boards in any of the early home C-band
Sat TV receivers? Several companies were calling each other thieves, but
they all copied the design from a Radio Electronics magazine article.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Brian said:
Some of mine are in very inaccessible places and no market to make more. I
LOVE jobs that are one-of-a-kind!

If I had access to some of the competitors gadgets that competed with things
I had designed, maybe I would have seen more. But forking out BIG money just
to see that is not gonna happen. Being a hired gun all that time, I rarely
stayed in the same market area for long. I have never been asked to formally
reverse engineer something and never had time to do it on my own. My usual
contracts were getting something out the door after marketing and
engineering had battled it out too long, fixing "show stoppers", or
designing all new systems.


I like doing the impossible, as well. My boss walked up to my bench
one day and asked if I would keep my eye out for a cheap, used 10 MHz DA
for the in house frequency standard. I laughed and told him I had one in
the back of my truck. Actually, it was a A/B switcher for selecting one
of a pair of minicomputers to multiple RGB color monitors that had 32
outputs buffered with LH0002 chips. A half hour of rewiring and I had a
1 in, 32 out DA. The funny thing was the rack plate it was built on
already had the serial number 0001 engraved. Not bad for a $10 purchase
at an industrial scrap yard. ;-)


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
Mostek developed the 6502 as a low cost processor to compete with the
6800 and it was designed by some of the same people who worked on the
6800.

Rockwell and about a dozen other companies were second source for the
6500 series of chips.

The NMOS 6800 was introduced at the bargain price of US $395 per chip
(back when that was not a bad week's wage) and required a nasty
dual-phase rail-to-rail (not TTL, it had to swing to within 250mV of
each rail fairly snappily) external clock circuit.

The 6502 was introduced at a much lower price ($20?), and had (IMHO) a
bit better architecture including dual pointers for efficient block
moves and a single phase TTL-input clock. It retained stuff like the
overflow flag which Motorola latter snipped out of the cheaper 6805
and almost totally snipped down 6804.

The 6501, which some people apparently are half-remembering, was a
version of the MOS Technology 6502 wot was pin-compatible with the
6800, and was removed from the market just about as quickly as it was
introduced, presumably after legions of Motorola lawyers descended on
MOS Technology.

I believe both the NMOS 6800 and the NMOS 6502 were dynamic (they had
a minimum clock frequency).


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
F

Frank Miles

Jan 1, 1970
0
Have you ever looked at a Tektronix RM529 and a HP 191 Waveform
Monitor, side by side? Look at the rear panel. the connectors are
placed to make the HP a drop-in replacement for the original RM529. The
early CCU consoles were pre wired, and it would take a lot of time to
slit all the lacing cord and replace the cables to fit a different
footprint.

I think it was the Tek 545 'scope that another company (Dumont? maybe
someone else) _copied_ (down to the number of turns on the power
transformer -- a hack-sawed Tek transformer was part of the evidence
IIRC), and sold to the US military. Decades later, Tek finally got
compensated for the loss of sales.

The time, expense, and effort required to reach any legal settlement
for these kinds of activities makes me very glad to be an engineer!

-f
--
 
R

Rich Grise

Jan 1, 1970
0
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.

They used different mnemonics, so an ordinary jury would toss out any
infringement case. All the defense would have to say is, "Look, they use a
completely different programming language! How can this be a "copy"?" ;-)

Cheers!
Rich
 
R

Rich Grise

Jan 1, 1970
0
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.

That's the problem when you "win" a case - you get a nice court
order, then you still have the task of extracting the money (and,
apparently, whatever else you've been "awarded") from the thief.

Thanks,
Rich
 
M

Mark Zenier

Jan 1, 1970
0
---
Mine too.

Segmented addresses?

Someone at Intel or Microsoft must have been sucking some IBM dick
to make that happen.

Maybe they were hanging around with the folks in their Data Processing
division and read a Univac 1100 manual, which has a very similar
segmentation system. Intel was a big Univac user at that time, and even
had a software division that sold some database software they had written.
The Semi companies were a lot closer to the big iron DP manufacturers in
those days. National even had a division that made clones of IBM 370
mainframes.

Microsoft was a half a dozen guys eating Pizza in Albuquerque, and
IBM was in full "we invent everything we need" mode back when the 8086
was cooked up.

Mark Zenier [email protected]
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)
 
D

David

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
Oops, Freescale.

John

Freescale (or Motorola before that) have wanted to EOL the 68332 for
years - it can't be made in their more modern lines, because the process
is to old. They tried to persuade customers to move to the MPC5xx line
(Power PC core, improved TPU), arranging prices to help, but the 68332
is as popular as ever.

If you ever feel you want to move on, go for the ColdFire MCF523x line.
You get a lot more for your money (eTPU, Ethernet, 150 MHz, etc.), and
the ColdFire core is based on the same ISA as the 68332. Even
programming in assembly, there will not be many changes needed to your code.
 
Top