Proprietary black box software - Re: on FPGA simulation

On Nov 17, 2011, at 7:55 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Possibly. This device went into telecom racks, which are generally highly redundant, so the problem would have been more of an annoyance (or really just a yield problem, since not all boards exhibited the bug) than anything else if we hadn't caught it before sending it out into the world. However, if it had been medical equipment or the like, it could have been a huge disaster. That's why most datasheets from most manufacturers have a bit in the back that says "This stuff isn't qualified for medical or other life-critical machinery, don't even think about using it in that without talking to us first". Our customer was disorganized enough not to even consider asking for some compensation from Freescale; in fact, they blamed us for the months it took to track down the bug, and I think to some extent they're still convinced that it's a design flaw on our part. The people who jump to that sort of conclusions are not the sort that can analyze the data I presented, unfortunately. - Dave