Timothy Miller wrote:
Well, we were already planning on releasing part or all of the boardRight. All of us software engineers are putting all our black art out in the open, the hardware engineers could do the same. :)
schematic, so I don't see that there would be any significant IP
issues. We have a lot of experience with making sure that the artwork
is done right for high-quality signaling. A fair amount of adjustment
might have to be made by our engineers if volunteers did it who are
not familiar with some of the constraints.
My boss wants to talk to his boss about it before we endorse that. However, there's no reason why you can't start a parallel effort, andOk. To do that, some sort of information about chipset your a designing for is needed. How about information on development kits for it? If volunteers are really going to get involved we are going to need a source of similar hardware to play with and get familiar with.
Of course, the community could do their own board andOK. I certainly understand that the company needs this for this effort to be successful. If you want a bunch of people to volunteer to help you design a new video card, well, as you can see there is lots of interest. My first thoughts, if you plan on a product in June, was to start asking about prototypes and designs. I didn't know that you had a team of people internally already doing that.
license the chip IP from us do that we can recoup the chip design
costs (plus money to invest in the next generation).
You know that we already get schematics & some register documentation from ATI & nVIDIA already? But that's still not enough to get good free drivers. Albeit the documentation varies from bad to awful, but there is some.
However, volunteers are not likely to be able to afford actually MANUFACTURING boards.Well, not something this modern. Maybe nothing with BGA parts. Then again, when was the last time a video card was developed by volunteers?
I'll let you know if this interferes with our basic intent of "sellingI don't think so either. The free software process just hasn't progressed very far into that field yet.
hardware" in some way. The general idea is to have the software done
by volunteers, and we do the hardware. We would share many aspects of
the hardware, but the rights to the hardware implementation would
belong to Tech Source. The thing about the board design, though, is
that there's nothing particularly sensitive in it... I think.
Jeff
It seems possible that the your first open graphics board would not have to be designed with PADS/MentorG/Autocad/etc. on Windows.
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