Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9front | Hacker News Reader

Socialist Romania did not pay to license Western chip technologies. All production was based on stolen IP. Ceausescu had a vast spy network stealing everything they could from abroad. The spy network was dismantled when Pacepa, the mastermind behind it, defected to US in 1978.

View on HN

Same for East German chips (mainly Z80 and family), but with the Western CoCom embargo in place for anything that was more advanced than a toaster [1] there wasn't really a legal way to obtain a license anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

It is to be mentioned, though, that some of the Eastern Bloc chips were only on the outside identical to the Western originals, but featured their own internal designs, some of them even robuster and/or more feature rich than the originals. It wasn't always just copy and paste.

True, at least the East German Z80 clone U880 was most likely "properly" reverse-engineered from a real chip's die photos (similar to how the visual6502 netlist was reverse engineered), with bug fixes applied in the process - because the U880 has a slightly different undocumented behaviour than an original Z80.

There are still conflicting stories to this day though (e.g. some licensed clones from other Western manufactures also differed in behaviour in those areas - so the U880 design could have been stolen from those), the only thing that's for sure is that the U880 isn't a "transistor-perfect" clone of an original Z80.

Based on what I've read, this seems to be also true for the soviet PDP-11 single-chip designs.

Participation in cross-border intellectual property agreements is voluntary. Even though it is more "forced voluntary" these days. But it is not an unalienable right.

They didn't just not pay intellectual dues, they actually stole blueprints, plans, any technical info they could get their hands on and tried reproducing locally.

In the absense of IP enforcement, blueprints cost the price of a sheet of paper and may actually be widely available.

Soviet TVs came with a huge blueprint of everything electronic what's inside so the customers (and repair booths) could repair it on the spot.

Remember that making optical copies of other people's chips was legal (and not uncommon) in the US up until the 1984 Semiconductor Chip Protection Act was passed.

Romania had the strongest ties with the western world among communist bloc states, and as such access to some technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_industry_in_the_So...

The pacepa event you are referring to is when ceausescu was directed by the russians to “penetrate” texas instruments. Here is an article about it from 1987: https://apnews.com/article/e45f1f4ba20cfa8c6e400948177970ed

Romania even license built British designed Jet Airliners during the Cold war era. Also they had a deal in the 1980s with Canada, to build Canadian design Nuclear power station in Romania.

"Devices licensed from Western manufacturers were often named according to the Pro Electron standard. Microelectronica assigned integrated circuit designations according to the underlying technology"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com