IANAL and I don't have much experience with the legal side of silicon IP but from some cursory conversations with people in the industry, if you're making a chi

IANAL and I don't have much experience with the legal side of silicon IP but from some cursory conversations with people in the industry, if you're making a chip as advanced as a VideoCore, you're certainly already cross licensing a lot of IP cores. If you license, for example, a EHCI compliant USB core or an MMU or cache pipeline that you get in the form of a VHDL or Verilog file (poor you), that license automatically transfers a right to the patents (as long as the legal chain of contracts were worked on by competent negotiators and lawyers) and rarely do those extend to firmware source code from my understanding. There could still be problems with the documentation of the interfaces to different cores or whatever, but that's peanuts to a company like Broadcom. I'd guess they already have very liberal agreements for important IP and the stuff you'd sue over is mostly the closed source silicon.