Fred Cisin wrote:
It's too bad that the only way that they can come
up with to prevent
abuse is to prevent anybody from building a programming device except
under close supervision. There must be a better way!
The better way that is being used now is to embed the programming
algorithm in the device itself, so you feed the data to it in a
relatively non-critical way, and the device programs itself. For most
current devices, getting the "programming algorithm", i.e., how to
present the data and tell it to program itself, is not difficult.
The other part that people complain about is not knowing the meaning of
the programming data stream for a CPLD or FPGA., and only being able to
get that data stream by using the vendor's proprietary tools. That's a
different problem, and there are even more reasons for that than there
were for not publishing programming algorithms.