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Julian Hall wrote:
Interesting point vis-avis escrow. It would be nice, albeit rather unlikely, for all hardware OEMs, of chips etc, to make their specs available to an escrow agent. Then if a developer wants data on a specific item he/she doesn't have to chase the OEM as an individual, the escrow agent could be approached who would then advise the OEM of the request. That way the developers have a 'one-stop-shop' for technical specs and the OEMs don't get a stream of individual requests for X Y and Z. Also it would give the OEMs a better idea of the enduser base for their products. If they get no requests for info on X product they can be *fairly* safe in assuming it's not of interest. Conversely if they get a lot of requests they may consider direct help to the developer.
Hi Julian,This does to some extent happen already, but not often enough with the chips we are interested in.
In the UK we have farnell, RS, arrow, electrospeed etc all of which are distributors for the larger electronics part manufactures, you can go to any of these and get datasheets free of charge for the devices they distribute. When you start getting to some of the more complicated chips they get harder to find and you often have to go to the manufacture who will then point you in the direction of a distributor. Also people like Phillips, TI (Texas Instruments), Burr Brown, to name a few provide datasheets on their website for their IC's.
The biggest problem is again FPGA's and ASICS, FPGAs are programmable and ASICS are application specific IC's. there are now fab plants that can almost rapid prototype new IC designs for a fraction of the cost it use to be. From our perspective this is bad as it means more in house closed development of products so less available data on IC's used. When a common IC is used then the data tends to be more available.
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