I agree with Steve that it is not appropriate to call MDT parts 
fakes and pirates. But the MCU is actively promoted as being 
compatible with PICs. I remember that Holtek being sued by 
Microchip some years ago and I wonder if MDT will be sued should
they being too successful even only in the great China region 
since that is a huge market.

As for Scenix parts (now Ubicom) I think they are now being offered
more through one distributor. They are not so unique in the market
as well since very fast and better 8-bit MCUs are emerging like 
those from Silabs. So they are no longer an American ingenuity. :)

Xiaofan

>Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 22:26:18 +1300
>From: steve@tla.co.nz
>> The Fake PICs are not fake PICs per se. I think we should call
>> them clone parts. According to some Chinese website, the most popular
>> pic clones are from MDT. 
>
>The MDT parts are pin compatible and have the same functionality, but 
>have their own instruction set and are not source or binary compatible 
>with any PIC. MDT do provide a utility function in their programmer that 
>will allow you to convert a PIC binary into the MDT format.
>
>So why are the MDT parts called clones, fakes and pirates while the 
>binary compatible, directly interchangeable Scenix parts were an 
>example of American ingenuity ?
>
>Steve.
 
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