On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:12:14 -0400, John Hudak
wrote:


We can thank our Asian friends for this. A friend of mine who worked at
NS told me of an incident where a Chinese company copied the design of
at least 3 NS IC's by acquiring their data sheets and engineering docs.
They were signal processing ICs. In the ongoing investigation, NS
found out that the information came from their online data sheets. He
would not go into details because the investigation is still going on
and related legal wrangling...

I am looking for the fallout from this being that it may infact be
almost impossible to get datasheets, or ones that don't go into the
architecture of the chips.
Interesting, we set up foundries, educate, and get out lunch taken away!

John

I'm blaming Hollywood for this. They are afraid that people will use
these ICs to steal HD movies.

There was a recent thread about how more and more TVs are being booby
trapped to try to prevent people from getting inside and finding the
decrypted video signals. They're doing this so they can tell the
Hollywood lawyers that they made every effort to make their sets
tamperproof when they do get sued after someone modifies a TV to steal
movies.
Andy Cuffe