Chip Maker Gets $35 Million Judgment

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."

Comments

A question:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.