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You would have problems with licensing the 68k ISA. I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.
by phire 6y ago
You would have problems with licensing the 68k ISA.
I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.
- DCKing 6y agoInteresting thing to consider. I wonder how actively people want to protect 68k, as not even Freescale/NXP seems to use it anymore. Shouldn't that already be problematic for the 68k projects in hardware through FPGAs? Apollo already does it and sells hardware, and the MiSTER project also does it by releasing FPGA designs for e.g. the Sega Genesis which has a 68k processor. Is it a different story if you embed 68k in an ASIC?
- afwaller 6y agoTexas Instruments still sells graphing calculators with 68k processors (TI-89 series, most commonly)
- nullc 6y ago> I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.
- webmaven 6y ago> > I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, > Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired. Sure, patents wouldn't be a barrier to clone the design and create an equivalent using the same patented ideas, but copyright still prevents you from copying the design, and will prevent copying significant parts of the design as well.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIn other words: you can rearchitect it from scratch, but you probably can’t extract the die.
- webmaven 6y ago"Probably" doesn't seem strong enough. I mean, the only thing that would give you any hope of avoiding being sued out of existence leaving nothing but a small greasy spot behind would be obscurity and commercial irrelevance.
- monocasa 6y agoAll the patents of all the non-Coldfire cores have expired, which is the mechanism for enforcing ownership over ISAs.