| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NDAs in the context of a patent license should legitimately be considered grounds for patent invalidation. Patent literally means "open to public inspection" and the entire premise is that you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for openly documenting how your invention works in the published patent. If there is something about the invention for an NDA to cover it means you left it out of the patent application, which is essentially an admission of wrongdoing. A patent is an alternative to a trade secret. You can't eat your cake and still have it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Joel_Mckay 3 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Patents do exist on popular IP cores, but in general standards compliant Verilog libraries are just vendor specific IP products. Thus, the copyright, NDA, and license agreements already keep the IP fairly locked down. For example, figuring out dram timing and DDR bus control yourself is nontrivial. Some groups have attempted open IP cores, and made some progress: However, the effort involved in getting standards compliant ASIC built puts folks in a Fabless manufacturing sector. Most firms that survive, will choose to stay with a generic FPGA option to avoid custom silicon unless absolutely necessary. Patents are often useless/vague in many places, but on occasion may prevent platform decay for a few years. One can be sure a unique/new design will not go to fab unless such protection is in place. =3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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