Lpc2000

Hi Brian, Bill,

> That is true, but doesn't help you at all when some anonymous chinese
> company clones your new widget. It also doesn't help much if you don't
> have 100k budgeted for lawyers to enforce your patents.

In countries like that patents aren't even valid anyway.

> I have no faith in protection offered by patents or contracts. I need to
> keep my code as secure as possible, given the application and
> distribution of the device.

Same viewpoint here.
I think that in the 8 bit arena, the first real level of protection was
offered
by AVR. Being an ASIC like that, things were scattered around too much,
and the charge in a Flash cell is too weak to microprobe it, or so I've
been told by Atmel.

> That's the bottom line. And the LPC doesn't provide anything that would
> prevent someone from cloning the chip using the JTAG interface. You can
> cut the pins, but that introduces extra assembly cost, and how hard is
> it to scrape off some of the chip's plastic and re-attach to them?

Exactly, as per my previous post.

> Plans for future code protection in the LPC don't help us now. And they
> are likely to be an after-thought when it ought to have been included
> from the start.

EXACTLY.
Some companies here in Oz really have been brought to their knees with
that crap.
The only protection really I guess is to flood the market fast so there's
not
much left for parasites, or at least, it wouldn't be worth their while
anymore.

-- Kris