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Is it safe?
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03/02/2005
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Theft is a serious problem in any walk of life, but design theft can be very expensive; for a company with limited resources, it could prove catastrophic. Yet offshore manufacturing – which is known to hold inherent danger for design security – exists in part because it enables resource limited companies to compete in the global market. This dichotomy is exacerbated by the fact that the design companies involved are likely to be using standard parts, so their intellectual property isn’t intrinsically buried deep inside a chip. This makes it relatively easy to reverse engineer a design and produce a functionally identical one.
Stealing IP in this way is one example of design theft and one that, amazingly, is tolerated in some areas. Another is overbuilding – where a contract manufacturer builds more units than required and sells the remainder at a lower price on the ‘grey’ market. Perhaps the most dishonourable form of design theft is cloning – where it isn’t just the functionality that’s copied, but the design itself, down to the last byte. The design is then reproduced using parts sourced legitimately on the open market.
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Author
Philip Ling
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