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Why do companies try to take patents out on standard schematics?

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Cerebus:

--- Quote from: Jester on November 08, 2021, 01:37:59 am ---Portable as in carry in your hand and the cost of a modest bungalow. We were doing a show and tell in San Jose with our best client, and we brought quite a few units and they were helping us carry them into the conference hall and the guy that had just placed a large order said to his guy careful that costs more than a Ferarri!

--- End quote ---

I once increased the value of my [almost new] Honda Prelude 4WS roughly twelvefold by putting 3 off 3U boxes into the back of it. :) (3 fully loaded Max4000s, the then industry standard termination device for trunks in the dial-up ISP days.)

AaronD:
Just to add a relatively minor point about letting loads of engineers see stuff:

I spent a year with an equipment supplier that had a revolving door of engineers.  You might say that that was awesome for getting fresh eyes on things, but it was actually a massive liability.  Each engineer, myself included, would build up some knowledge of how this company and these machines worked...and then take it all with them when they left.

Combined with the "previous project with changes" mentality, this created an absolute mess of technical debt to the point that one of my major assignments during the year that I put up with, was to create an entirely new template from scratch that could be copied for each project *instead of* copying the previous one.  The idea was to throw away the unusably brittle pile of band-aids that all of these transient engineers ended up with, in favor of this all-new thing that I did.  I have my doubts that that actually happened though, despite it working perfectly as far as I could test on the bench and on one customer's site.

The guy that they just happened to hire as my eventual boss, a handful of months before he hired me, turned out to be really good!  They told him to "fix engineering", so he went into it with that mentality, and quickly figured out that it was really a management problem.  Engineering was simply being ignored and then blamed for not delivering the moon that the salesmen promised.  When I left, he decided to stand up to them...and they eliminated his position.

Zero999:

--- Quote from: GopherT on November 07, 2021, 03:28:42 pm ---I don't think it is a question of paranoia, it is about efficiency and accountability.  If two engineers are assigned to build a bog-simple circuit, the company doesn't need "loads of engineers" putting eyes on it. The two engineers should be given remedial training, and mentoring if they have trouble with "bog simple" circuits. The cost of putting a circuit on copper is dropping so low that a fast failure is cheaper than an an endless review and error check.

Finally, when "loads of engineers" review a circuit, blame is diluted, root causes (or substandard employees) cannot be identified and the wasted time becomes a culture of mediocracy. 

If you are the one asking to see someone else's circuit, you need more projects of your own.
If you want "loads of other engineers" to review your circuit, you may be the root cause of sub-par performance.

--- End quote ---
I agree that a simple circuits shouldn't require peer review, but is it worth trying to keep basic designs secret?

And even reasonably experienced people do occasionally make silly mistakes.  The classic is using the wrong footprint, because the CAD library or data sheet contained an error, they missed.

I disagree with you about diluting the blame. Ultimately the person who signs off a design bares the ultimate responsibility, but playing the blame game all the time, is counterproductive.

fourfathom:
I shudder at the idea of having my products constantly under "design review" whenever a random fresh engineer walked in the door.  We put together skilled engineering teams who designed complicated products.  The projects had formal and informal reviews all throughout the design and prototype process, and feature feedback from the field after release.  It would be a full-time job for a new-hire to review even a fraction of the designs in our products, not to mention the time required for the responsible design team to explain it all to the new-hire.  And then the new-hires wouldn't have time to work on the project we needed them on.

And what about the firmware, software, and the ASICs?  These designs are probably more error-prone than the board and schematic-level design.

Zero999:

--- Quote from: fourfathom on November 08, 2021, 04:41:57 pm ---I shudder at the idea of having my products constantly under "design review" whenever a random fresh engineer walked in the door.  We put together skilled engineering teams who designed complicated products.  The projects had formal and informal reviews all throughout the design and prototype process, and feature feedback from the field after release.  It would be a full-time job for a new-hire to review even a fraction of the designs in our products, not to mention the time required for the responsible design team to explain it all to the new-hire.  And then the new-hires wouldn't have time to work on the project we needed them on.

And what about the firmware, software, and the ASICs?  These designs are probably more error-prone than the board and schematic-level design.

--- End quote ---
I don't think anyone is talking about getting every engineer in the company, including graduates, to review every design. I just don't see the point in only allowing a small group of engineers to access the drawings/source code. Fair enough if it has a security classification such as restricted, or secret, but it's otherwise pointless. I see new engineers being able to access existing designs, as a good thing. If they do spot potential bugs and have suggestions about how something can be improved, then all the better.

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