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Rockbox mail archiveSubject: Re: SD Card BUS royalties on a new hardwareRe: SD Card BUS royalties on a new hardware
From: uhmgawa <uhmgawa_at_third-harmonic.com>
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:23:09 -0400 Casainho wrote: > Hello :-) > > We are working on Lyre project, a Free/Open hardware audio player > (DAP) and recorder, for use with RockBox firmware. > > We want to boot our ARM9 from SD Card, but we would like to avoid the > need to pay royalties for using the SD BUS for communicate with card. > > Does anyone knows if this ids true? > >> I think the royalties for the SD Bus are payed by the IC >> manufacturer. > > Or the manufacturer should pay the royalties? in this case, us, before > selling the hardware? - we pretend to assembly and sell on Ebay... > IIRC the licensing kicks in at the point a manufacturer uses the SD logo to advertise their device as SD compliant. But IANAL and things may have changed since I last looked at this so you'll need to do some legwork to verify your legal obligations relative to your situation. Start here: http://www.sdcard.org/developers/howto If you are adding an SD host controller to your device (or paying for the same integrated into the SoC) it seems odd not to use the controller -- if for nothing else than to offload the CPU. That said you could get by without a controller at audio bit rates by talking to an SD card in SPI mode. This is bit serial and only yields 25% of the theoretical maximum bandwidth available in 4-bit SD mode. But it is cheap and more than sufficient to transfer audio data to/from the card. If you don't have a SPI controller you could even bit bang an interface assuming you have sufficient CPU bandwidth available. -- uhmgawa_at_third-harmonic.comReceived on 2009-04-09 Page template was last modified "Tue Sep 7 00:00:02 2021" The Rockbox Crew -- Privacy Policy |