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Technology Stocks : ARM Holdings (Advanced RISC Machines) plc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Pulley who wrote (620)	11/5/2001 3:19:47 PM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 912

ARM clone taken offline, talks between its designer and ARM By Peter Clarke, Electronics Times Nov 5, 2001 (1:49 AM) URL: electronicstimes.com A clone of the ARM7 core, previously freely available on Internet, has been taken offline while discussions take place between Shengyu Shen, its designer, and a Chinese representative of ARM Holdings. The core vanished as ARM disclosed that it has also decided not to offer a lightweight version of the ARM processor for students and university researchers, although the move was mooted earlier this year. The existence of an officially approved 'ARM lite' processor might dissuade other students from attempting to clone ARM instruction set architectures. But it could disrupt the commercial market, says an ARM executive. Since July, the Chinese-developed clone, in the form of a synthesisable Verilog language description, was available at www.opencores.org/projects/nnARM. The site now states: "The team members of nnARM are currently discussing with a company to sort out some issues [sic]. This web page is not available until further notice." The 'issues' are likely to include technology and potential patent infringement. Shen, a graduate student at the National University of Defence Technology at Changsha, Hunan province, is listed as maintainer of the project. It is believed that a Chinese representative of ARM is trying to set up a telephone conference or a meeting between Shen and Matt Lee, university programme manager at ARM. Shen appears to have chosen to take down or hide the nnARM clone at the Open Cores site while awaiting the outcome of any discussions with ARM. The Chinese government has taken a much harder line on piracy, counterfeiting and intellectual property protection issues in the run-up to its full membership of the World Trade Organisation. Lee said: "I have spoken to our Chinese representative, but I haven't yet been invited to [join in a phone conference]." When asked why ARM needed to talk to Shen, Lee said: "He's a very bright chap." OpenCores, the organisation of which Shen is a member, is a loose but global affiliation of hobbyists, students and professional engineers, which aims to produce open-source synthesisable circuit descriptions. The website shows more than 50 hardware cores as 'projects' and lists 26 as complete, including several processors, peripherals and cryptographic cores.