Subject: David's patent question
From: Jonathan Sanders (jons@cadence.com)
Date: Fri Aug 17 2001 - 14:08:15 PDT
Committee,
Attached is a PDF of the cross licensing agreement that OVI/Accellera
approved to deal with the Cadence commitment to provide access to its
patents for use in implementations of Verilog-A/AMS. Cadence had
committed to OVI that it would provide access to any of its patents that
were required to implement the specification to those that would do the
same. Basically if you have no patents that are required to implement the
standard you are getting access to the Cadence patents for free to
implement the specification. If you have patents that are required to
implement the specification then in order to gain access to the Cadence
patents you need to cross license yours the same way. All vendors to date
that were involved in the committee claimed they did not have any patents
that were required other than Cadence. Being I did not attend the OVI
meetings and I am not a lawyer myself (but knowing what they would tell me)
the above statements are my interpretation of what was agreed to and not
legal opinions :)
This agreement was done at the OVI board level and I believe agreed to by
all (or near all). The original letter was sent to all board members on 10
Jul 1998 and voted on shortly there after. The letter was recently
cleaned up to remove some of the greeting comments and to better clarify
where to send your signed copy or how to ask questions. The previous
version had a specific lawyer name who is no longer here, now it points to
an office and an alias email account. OVI was suppose to include this with
every copy of the LRM that they send out but my experience from those I
know that have ordered it that it has not been done.
Jon
BTW, Here are the Cadence patents I know of in the AHDL space but I believe
there was one more in process so if it was approved it also might have
impact. Don't know if and which of these are an issue.
5,623,419 "Modeling of Multi-Disciplinary Signals"
5,634,115 "System and method for behavioral description translation"
5,812,431 "Method and Apparatus for a Simplified System Simulation
Description"
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Jonathan L. Sanders
Product Engineering Director
Custom IC Solutions
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
555 River Oaks Pkwy
San Jose, CA. 95134
INTERNET:jons@cadence.com Tel: (408) 428-5654 Fax : (408) 944-7265
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