I don’t understand why chipmakers seem to always restrict access to documentation on chips. Their competitors will get it anyway. This only creates more problems for small developers.
If only. In the past it was common to provide schematics of your hardware in order that people could repair it. This was common for consumer products, industrial, instrumentation, test gear, almost everything. For example, the manual for the Amiga 500 had the schematics in it.
While I was at University I made some money by repairing DJ-hardware. Controllers, CD-Players and Turntables. There things are often expensive, but they are quite easy to repair because there are detailed service manuals available. Not on the official sites, though.
Example: in the past my friend bought Moog Prodigy synthesizer and along with everything it also came with all the electronic circuitry diagrams. Good luck finding anything like this with the modern hardware.
You wish they were stuck in the past. People like Steve Wozniak often designed new stuff only based on the manuals that back then had complete schematics in them. They didn’t have enough money first to buy anything but that information later on resulted in sales.
The electronics and computers industries have been built initially based on free detailed documentation from all the manufacturers of components.
When I was a student in electronics, I learned more from datasheets and application notes than from most university manuals.
All companies continued to provide good technical documentation until close to the year 2000.
With the growth of the Internet I believed that it will become easier than ever to get technical documentation, as it could be now downloaded instead of having to get printed copies.
Unfortunately, at the end of the nineties a lot of negative tendencies have appeared. Many large electronics companies with decades of successful histories were split (e.g. Motorola, Siemens, Philips and others) and their successors seem to have lost most of their previous experience.
A large number of other electronics companies have started a descending evolution and, sooner or later, between 2000 and 2020, they were bought by competitors, so now only a handful of US non-fabless manufacturers of semiconductor devices have survived.
At the same time the incomprehensible fashion of requiring Non-Disclosure Agreements for getting the complete datasheets or even any datasheets has become more and more widespread.
This policy of the NDA has been conceived by morons who have not the slightest idea about how an electronics product is designed.
Whenever I design a new product, I need first to be able to read all the datasheets of all the products that might have even an extremely remote chance to be useful, to decide and select what I could use.
I will not bother to sign an NDA to learn about products that might be not useful at all for me.
The only positive effect that the NDA may have for a producer is that it might prevent the already existing customers to redesign their products, because they might not bother to obtain similar NDA from other vendors. On the other hand requesting NDA's will deter many potential new customers, especially due to the insistence on providing an estimated sales volume, before signing the NDA.
That is stupid, because before seeing the information under NDA I have no idea if I would ever want to buy 1 sample, much less 1 million pieces per year.
Managers seem much happier about NDA's than designers, because they frequently feel like they are some sort of special bond with the vendor and the information under NDA provides some sort of competitive advantage, but that is extremely far from the truth.
In most cases the only valuable information contained in the datasheets under NDA was about horrible bugs that required complex workarounds. If I had known about the bugs before the NDA, I might have never chosen those components, so maybe that was a desirable feature of the NDA for the vendor.
The end result is that when I was young and I designed anything, I could choose any component from a large number and I could easily select the best for my specific needs. Moreover, in many cases I could find a method to use in a novel way something that was not intended for my particular application, but due to the good documentation I could understand whether it would be good for different uses.
Now there is frequently just one remaining producer for any component, or if there are more of them, you might need to choose one by lottery, because without the information under NDA you cannot know who has the product more suited for you, and you can sign the NDA only if you are already committed to buy that product and not another.
That's a positive from their competitors requiring an NDA, not for they requiring one.
Anyway, large software sellers benefit a lot from stupid procedures from their clients that create a huge cost to start buying from a new supplier (like passing all suppliers through legal or having a management vote for them). If all hardware manufacturers require NDAs, they can force their buyers into creating similar procedures, closing the market for new entrants.
The legal departments within companies have very, very different measures of success than that of just about anyone else. If you have weak company leadership, legal will start to drive policy more than it should.
That's a really interesting dynamic I have never experienced or heard of. Explains a lot! Do you know other examples?
(ed. clarify which part I wanted examples for)
It's a very different game than Intel's business model, which depended on a pure performance play and being 18-36 months ahead of all competitors tech wise. TI's strategy requires way more customer contact and development, because analog applications are so much more specific.
This is exactly why: to stop small developers from buying them. There are three types of components in the electronics world to my observation.
1. Components for the general public (e.g. opamps, microcontrollers, power supply controllers) - the datasheets are publicly available. This is probably 70% of the marketplace.
2. Components for the OEM - Some components are only meant to be sold to OEMs in huge quantity. For example, a company may sell $1 LCD controllers, if such a company is only interested in selling to huge manufacturers for big money, they often classify their datasheets as "confidential" - it's a joke, the only purpose is stop small developers from wasting their time. Whether it's a Type-2 part heavily depends on the company. For example, a big U.S. semiconductor company may sell it to the general public, but a cheap Taiwanese vendor often classifies all the information as confidential.
3. Security through obscurity. If the chip contains unique or advanced technology, for example, the latest generation of NAND flash or SoC, the datasheet is classified to make it more difficult for other people to do market research. Similarly, the payment card and consumer DRM vendors essentially own the security chip industry, selling channels of the chip and availability of the datasheets are tightly controlled.
Type-2 and Type-3 are responsible for the most frustrating experience. If you are an independent kernel hacker who wants to port Linux to a new gadget, not being able to get the datasheet of the $1 LCD controller because it's "confidential" is a real headache.
But as I mentioned previously, Type-2 chips are not really secret - the confidentiality is only meant to stop small developers from bothering them. Thus, the chips themselves can usually be found for sale on the Shenzhen electronics marketplace, and it's often possible to find numerous leaked datasheets on the web. You can also reverse engineer consumer gadgets as a reference design. For example, Realtek Ethernet controllers, 100% of the public datasheets are leaked by insiders. If it's not, sometimes getting the datasheet may be possible you do some social engineering, "we are prototyping a new product based on the LCD controller chip, now our problem is register xxh..."
On the other hand, if it's Type-3, don't even think about it.
The vast majority of products by TI are Type-I: Usually all technical documentation is provided on the website, with schematics, PCB layouts, and reference designs (unless it's a specialized chip for a particular application). I recently used a TI chip in my design just because of the availability of documentation.
> Here is TI DMCAing a bunch of random datasheets. Completely jellybean stuff like 555s, 74xx logic, and op-amps. Nope nope nope nope. This is crazy.
These chips don't even belong to the Type-2 category. It's unreasonable to send DMCA takedown notices in terms of security-through-obscurity. The only explanation I can see is TI's overzealous corporate policies.
TI is great to work with on Type 1 chips. They're nowhere near the worst in the Type 3 category. (Looking at you, Qualcomm and Marvell.)
I totally agree that the DMCA notices issued don't make much sense, given this context. I just get irritated by OSHW folks acting like their business means something to TI. They are ants crying in the footprints of elephants.