Commentary: Palmchip patents the obvious (by John Cooley)

Palmchip patents the obvious
By John Cooley, EEdesign
September 12, 2003 (6:05 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030912S0062

I was blown away when I read that PalmChip was recently granted a patent on unidirectional muxed buses on systems-on-chip. Engineers have been designing non-tristate buses ever since forever.

"Our first phase is to inform the SoC industry that we have been granted this patent," said James Venable, vice president of marketing at PalmChip, in a This means the PalmChip lawyers and engineers will be going door to door to do a shakedown to collect on this absolutely absurd patent they somehow snookered the U.S. Patent Office into granting them.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against people who do real innovation being able to benefit from their inventions, but in this case it seems clear that PalmChip just patented the obvious and is trying to claim it's special and innovative because it's on an SoC. What's next? Intel claiming a patent on NAND gates on SoC chips?

Anyway, the one way to tell PalmChip to take a hike is to show them all the "prior art" that makes their patent void. In that light, I'd like to ask anyone who has worked on an SoC that did what the PalmChip patent claims prior to the day PalmChip filed (May 2, 2000) to please e-mail me. Send me the name of the SoC project, the company where it was done and the date, and the prior art that is contained in it.

I'll eagerly share this grand list of prior art with anyone who needs it to pleasantly show the PalmChip lawyers exactly where they can stick their spiffy new U.S. Patent No. 6,601,126.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley @TheWorld.com or (508) 429-4357.