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Is this legitimately licensed IP, or at this point stolen IP?
by daneel_w 4y ago
Is this legitimately licensed IP, or at this point stolen IP?
- londons_explore 4y agoThe clones tend to be reimplemented from scratch. It turns out a team of 10 in a few months can reimplement a small microcontroller from just the public documentation of a competitor. By being 100% compatible, customers can move across without any engineering work, and you can reuse the same toolchain. I doubt either the manufacturer or their customers will have any legal issues. On the other hand, you probably will have issues when the original and the clone differ slightly or have different bugs.
- mmoskal 4y agoTFA says this one isn't STM32 clone though. Just the peripherals are similar. Not sure about ARM license.
- duskwuff 4y ago> Not sure about ARM license. I wouldn't be surprised if that's legit. The Cortex-M0/M0+ core is fairly inexpensive to license and use. It's effectively a loss-leader for ARM.
- benj111 4y agoWhy would it be a loss leader? Surely it's because 0.1c X a bajillion chips is still a lot.
- londons_explore 4y agoBecause there are a lot of other tiny microcontroller ISA's, and there isn't much value in using one over another. If they charged much at all, then people would just use another.