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Chip Maker Gets $35 Million Judgment

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the levels-of-hurt-i-don't-want-to-think-about dept.

Neoflexycurrent writes "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a $35 million judgment against Clear Logic for violation of the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984. The court concluded that the jury properly rejected Clear Logic's argument that it had legitimately reverse engineered Plaintiff Altera Corporation's mask work design to create cheaper application-specific integrated circuits."

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. masks and copyright by Colonel+Panic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's been a while since I worked in that part of the industry, but as I recall, masks used to be copyrighted. Is that part of the issue here?

  2. A question: by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Did Clear Logic:
      1) just reverse engineer the masks of the FPGA to figure out how to decode the programming stream and automatically make an ASIC with the same functionality, or
      2) actually clone significant sections of one or more of the FPGA masks themselves into the mask geometry generation step for the automatic ASIC design process, so that the geometry of the FPGA mask is reproduced (perhaps with edits, such as jumpers where programmable transistors would be) in the masks for the ASIC?

    If 1), IMHO they were blameless. If 2), IMHO the jury called it correctly.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  3. It's a confusion of scope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I'm reading the article correctly, and the law, and the decision -

    The law in question allows someone to reproduce a photomask /if it's appropriate under IP law to do so/ - It allows them to reverse-engineer a photomask if it's public domain, has been licensed to them, or is owned outright by them - OR if they're trying to figure out how to debug/interface their own code that's being programmed onto an Altera FPGA. It does not seem either of these is the case.

    What Clear Logic seems to have done is get ahold of an Altera FPGA / photomask, and reverse-engineer the programmer portion of the chip - And then made their own device, which translated signals that COULD HAVE been sent to an Altera Field Programmer into the Altera's internal signals to program the Gate Array, and used /those/ signals to lay out their own ASIC.

    Basically, they seem to have hijacked Altera's programming controller (a sizeable chunk of IP) for their own purposes. And probably didn't license it.

    Altera is suitably disturbed because every one of the ASICs Clear Logic makes with their stolen work could have (in theory, anyway) been money in their pocket from licensing the field programmer or could have had their FPGA in place.

    It's as if one has a dynamic web-page generator and backend database, and someone stole the code for that dynamic web page generator & backend database and used it to churn out their own static pages (and sold them) because one's program inherently produces good design.

    1. Re:It's a confusion of scope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      This is pretty darn close to what was happening. There's a little more to the story: Clear Logic not only hijacked Altera's masks, bitstream and programmer, they were also providing Altera's CAD software, Quartus II, as the CAD development environment for their users. Their flow for their users was: design and debug in Quartus II, send the bitstream to Clear Logic, get an ASIC back, bypass Altera.

  4. Can any of you lawyers tell me... by Hosiah · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How you explain the intricacies of computer architechture to 12 jurors sufficiently that they can arrive at a well-informed verdict, yet tech support people become continuously frustrated trying to explain to the average user that it's a CD tray and not a cup-holder, etc.?