Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 09:02 AM EST |
But based on the (currently legal) principle of corporate personhood, couldn't a
corporation be skilled enough in all the engineering arts to avoid infringement?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: JamesK on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 05:24 PM EST |
If you get right down to it, even before ASIC & FPGA, ordinary ROMs
(including EPROMs) were used to provide custom logig. Many years ago, I built a
keyboard encoder with a 2716 EPROM and a bit of discrete logic. That would have
been back in the early '80s or so. I also used to maintain minicomputers that
had microcode, stored in ROMs, to control bit slice processors, to create the
computer's instruction set. Going back even further, diode arrays were used in
a similar manner.
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The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- 2708 - Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 11:00 AM EST
- 2708 - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 31 2013 @ 02:44 PM EST
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 06:48 PM EST |
Nice piece of work, Ian Al. Your conclusions follows
quite logically. This
reader wanted to jump up and scream -
"Software patents are a fraud perpetrated
on society!" - but
I resisted the temptation to do so... this time, anyhow. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 31 2013 @ 02:38 PM EST |
VHDL is remarkably similar to the Ada programming language. It basically *IS*
Ada with some new class definitions that are specific to hardware. The source
code (VHDL or Verilog) that makes an ASIC work is identical to the source code
that makes an FPGA work. The only difference between the two is in where the
translation occurs between the idea and the implementation. There is also a
difference in cost. FPGAs cost a few hundred dollars each. ASICs require an
up-front cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars for the foundry to make
the chips, but the chips themselves may cost only a few dollars each.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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