Swedish students clone ARM7
In only twenty weeks, a group of Swedish students at Malardalen University built a "near clone" of the ARM7 processor CPU developed by Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. The leader of the project was motivated by his inability to get a university license for the configurable ARM7TDMI processor and used what he says are public domain sources for all the information he used to develop the processor.
At the moment, the "BlackARM" runs slow and does not support the entire ARM instruction set, but the team is considering improving their design and making it available as open source. ARM Ltd. licenses its technology to AT&T, IBM, Panasonic, Apple Computer, Matsushita, Sanyo and others. An ARM spokesman has voiced opposition to commercial cloning.
To read the source article, go to eet.com.
For an ARM overview, go to nightflight.com.
