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From: faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Japanese 32-bit micro can be a 68020 or 80386
Message-ID: <3527@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 19 May 88 03:23:40 GMT
References: <53780@sun.uucp> <2006@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Lines: 13

In article <53780@sun.uucp>, david@sun.uucp (David DiGiacomo) writes:
> ... As far as I can tell, Shima is designing a 386 clone which
> uses PLAs for instruction decoding and sequencing.  The theory seems to be
> that this will completely avoid the microcode copyright issue...

Hmm, that's really interesting.  If you reverse engineer the microcode,
feed it to a logic synthesis tool (like a PLA optimizer and generator),
and put that on your chip, isn't that just like taking excerpts from
somebody's book and rearranging them, changing the names of all the
characters, and making global substitutions like "do not" for "don't",
then selling it under your own name?  What does copyright law say about
this?

	Wayne