Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by baybal2 3487 days ago
>Wow. An app store for FPGA IPs

I see people making video transcoder instances on day 1, and MPEGLA bankrupting Amazoners with lawsuits on day 2

3 comments

I guess the online distribution of FPGA configurations was an eventual event?
This was already a thing. Plenty of marketplaces exist for FPGA IPs. It's just not that well known because high end FGPAs run $7k+ and complex IP cores can be $20k+ for a license.
So if you were to get a cheap license via a service like this, do you get access to the VHDL or equivalent or could you extract it in some way?
Probably not. Depends on how the core is distributed. Either you'll get HDL or netlists, and they may or may not be encrypted. Obviously the synthesis software has to decrypt it to use it, so like all defective by design DRM it doesn't make it impossible to get at the code, it just makes it more difficult. However, a netlist is just a schematic, so you would have to 'decompile' that back to HDL (and lose the names, comments, etc) if you want to modify it. It's also possible that you would only get the binary FPGA configuration file (this marketplace seems like one more for complete appliances and not IP cores) so you would have to back a netlist out of that somehow and then reverse-engineer it from there.
there are "encrypted" hdls, but encrypted no more than dvd discs. Find a right irc channel and ask for keys
Pretty sure the AWS EULA makes you responsible for violating any IPs. I didn't read it, but if it doesn't say so already then their lawyers are crap.
> I see people making video transcoder instances on day 1, and MPEGLA bankrupting Amazoners with lawsuits on day 2

Only if they distribute it through amazon. Just put the code up in a torrent; anyone can run it without MPEGLA knowing.