[Patents] Patnews on Pierret

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

Don writes:
>Since software-creating entitues are in many cases much different
>from, and certainly more diverse than, hardware-creating entities,
>the rational decision to make will be to move the patentability line
>to exclude software .....

This is a purely economic argument, which a) is not compatible with IP
law, and b) has a dubious premise, making the conclusion dubious.

Because all software can be automatically mapped in FPGA patterns, one
can naively argue that all software programmers are de facto hardware
designers, making software-creating entities as diverse as
hardware-creating entities, because they are the same.  Second, if
you don't subscribe to Electronic Engineering Times, I suggest that
you quickly, because the exhaustively cover the hardware design world.

In one of their recent articles, they reported that the hardware-IP design
world (i.e. people who use hardware design tools to create hardware
designs that they sell in source code (like VHDL) form) are approaching
a billion dollars a year in sales and licenses.  Indeed, there are
efforts to develop things like SystemC, a form of C to greatly facilitate
conversion of C-like coding directly into hardware, which should further
spur the development of hardware/software codesign tools.

Intel could end all of these discussions by including on their motherboards
a multimillion-device FPGA chip tightly coupled to the CPU.  Then software
vendors would be reduced to distributing their products as digital circuit
gate array patterns in source code form.

Put as much cosmetics on them as you want, and call them whatever you
like, put in the end hardware and software, practically and conceptually
are too intertwined to be separable for intellectual property purposes.

Start reading Electronic Engineering Times (or go hang out at the IEEE
hardware/software codesign conferences such as DAC).  And then write an
article for your Linux magazine on Linux hardware/software codesign
tools.

Greg Aharonian