New-Tech Europe Digital Magazine | May 2016

ASICs allow cost-effective IP protection for technology inventions

IC-LINK’S PHILL CHRISTIE

If you are a technology innovator, you’ll want your efforts and inventions to be protected from copying. Patents are a first line of defense, but enforcing them though litigation may be expensive and time-consuming. A more preemptive approach is to implement your IP as a package that is all but impossible to copy, e.g. as a dedicated application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Due to the long-term trend of price reductions for advanced (but not necessarily leading- edge) foundry technologies, it has become an attractive and cost- effective option for innovative SME’s to design such an ASIC. Patents are your first line of protection, but can you enforce them? The origin of patents may be traced

SME’s, this may place an important burden on their efforts to bring their innovative products to market. For one, as an innovator, you often have financial constraints, especially because you investment costs – particularly R&D – are incurred before they have any prospect of revenues. Your PCBs will be reverse engineered, fast At some point, intellectual property in the technology domain has to be physically implemented and manufactured. This still often takes the form of a PCB (printed circuit board) comprised of a variety of mounted discrete components, which may include a power supply, Bluetooth functionality and a microcontroller. The problem with this widely-used approach is illustrated by an internet search query for the phrase “PCB reverse engineering”. This returns over 20,000 hits and clearly represents

back in time to Queen Elizabeth I of England who granted monopoly privileges to businesses by means of letters patent, meaning public documents. These ultimately enabled investors to form business ventures to explore business opportunities in the New World. Starting out as a royal permission for the exclusive commercialization of land, patents have since evolved to become legally enforceable rights that provide exclusive control over the production and sale of Intellectual Property (IP), otherwise known as inventions. A company who implements an invention without the permission of the patent holder is said to have infringed the patent. But it is up to the owner of the patent to discover the infringement and initiate court proceedings. For some technology companies, especially startups and

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