very true.  and frankly, most of what people consider "proprietary" is
easier to redesign from scratch than to reverse engineer in the first
place.  unless there are hundreds of hours of work involved or something
that really is extremely clever (and many things that seem very clever
have been done before but you've just re-invented them, it happens all
the time).  however i doubt you can identify a de-marked chip rapidly,
most of them from the same manufacturer look identical as far as i can
tell.  on the other hand there are simple electrical test that can help
identify things pretty rapidly if you have some idea.  it's really the
code you want to protect, and de-marking the chip isn't going to provide
much additional security to whatever the chip maker has done to secure
your' code (which again may not be that hard to duplicate functionally).
 i don't want to insult any one, but honestly most of the things i've
seen people go to great lengths to protect with these tricks are not as
clever or hard to reinvent as they seem to think they are, at least not
for any one who's designed a lot of stuff before and knows that
particular field of application at all or bothers to spend a little time
learning about it.  it's nice to make someone go to the work of
reinventing it rather than stealing it, but you have to decide how much
work you are willing and need to do (from an economic stand point) to
protect it.  potting the whole thing in epoxy is probably more worth
while if you are really worried about it.  i confess i'll be epoxy
coating the chips on one of my projects, but only to prevent very, very
casual duplication of something that's cheap any way.

Herbert Graf wrote:
------
> Sorry, no. Unless you're using a REALLY obscure chip a trained eye would
> have a good idea of what part it is within about 5 seconds. I personally
> wouldn't even bother, in fact, a chip with it's markings removed would
> probably cause someone to try HARDER to copy your chip, since anything
> hidden automatically "activates" certain people.
-----

-- 
Philip Stortz, mad scientist at large -- "It is sobering to reflect that
one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen
these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding
fathers used in the struggle for independence." -- Charles A. Beard


_______________________________________________
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist