I lived thru that era using Motorola processors and even I can't keep track of who sued who for what despite having been there at the time. I remember subscrib

I lived thru that era using Motorola processors and even I can't keep track of who sued who for what despite having been there at the time. I remember subscribing to that newsgroup. Basically, Hitachi and Motorola, much like land fiber based phone companies, they love and hate each other, often at the same time. On one hand everyone at the cutting edge of tech has to be on the same edge, and certain lucrative .gov contracts require second sources for hardware so they have to cooperate, on the other hand the bean counters see it as an income stream to sue each other for infringement, possibly as a merger strategy gone bad, or just stupidity and arrogance, who knows. From memory, Hitachi sued Motorola over their 68hc11 microcontroller infringing Hitachi's patents primarily as punishment because Motorola licensed all their pre-'86 CPU technology to Hitachi while Hitachi was of the opinion Motorola falsely post-dated a bunch of hardware features post-'86 literally to F them over when Hitachi marketed their H-8 and H-16 processors. Somehow this lawsuit battle continued into the 90s with Hitachi threatening injunctions on Motorola shipping 68030 processors which were used in early Mac computers, that made the news. In the end, nobody was successful nor made money other than the lawyers. So in summary, if somebody permits you to second source a design even though they hate you and are in a battle to the legal death with you, and you're like "LOL I can trivially make a 2.0 improved version of this old POS" then depending on how the legal battle is going later on, you might just ship the silicon and kinda not talk about how its a 2.0 improved version that's faster and lower power and new features. Or in a summary of the summary, the two companies loved/hated each other and there were so many weirdly worded license agreements and open legal cases, that its not entirely clear what was legal or illegal about manufacturing a "2.0" of someone elses processor design.