Re: Is is possible to receive a cheep SubVendorID?

[Dimiter Popoff <tgi_earth@yahoo.com>]

Dave,

>When the PCI SIG was just starting out, such
>membership fees helped to fund the startup
>activities of the organization for working sessions,
>etc., to get the initial specs out and organize
>plug-fests, etc.

you seem to be familiar with that period of history. Could
you tell us which companies were involved then and how
much money did they gather from membership fees?

>...For certain, there are many companies
>whose membership is not current, but the SIG has
>declined to drop and/or re-assign their Vendor ID.
>To do so would create mayhem of the worst sort,
>with conflicting ID's, etc.

Sounds more and more like a protective mechanism to me... Those who
had to get the ID got it and did not even bother to pay again.

>The other benefits that accrue to member
>companies is access to draft specifications,
>the ability to participate in the standards process,
>and voting rights.  

Oh please don't mix them all together.

I do not claim voting rights - I do not even claim participation
in the process of standardisation, though the latter would not
hurt (see how the earlier mentioned examples like t10 and t13
work) - but I certainly would like to have access to the draft
standards. 
Keeping them secret just means that those who control PCI need
the one or two years of secret work to be able to produce something
which the others out there won't be able to 'comply' with
within several months.

>After a hue and cry, particularly
>from the academic community, this policy was
>changed.

A look the numbers at the stock exchange related to those who
control PCI - and matching them to the level of the technology
they have - will make you believe they changed their policy
not because they wanted to do so.

>Perhaps it is time for some SIG members to float
>the idea that there should be a one-time low-cost
>Vendor ID registration, say, $250 or so, to simply
>defray the costs of administering the database...

No deal :-). My proposal is still valid: use that 0xFA3C
and have a free subvendor ID and device ID,
I'll personally maintain this for free.

>Note that if a bunch of folks got together
>and pooled their money to buy a Vendor ID, they
>could then hand out up to 65K Device ID's, as they
>see fit.  

Yeah, now try to sell them $FA3C.

>On the subject of someone inventing their own
>PCI interface circuitry, I would assert that
>that is a more difficult proposition than one
>may think. ....

Now, Dave, misleading students is certainly not ethical. 
It is _not_ hard at all for a skilled guy to program a PCI
inerface into a silicon which can contain it.

>In all of these  situations, I would expect the vendor of
>the IP  to also offer a Device ID registration service, to
>relive the developer of the burden of registering  their 
>own Vendor ID. 

What if I _don't_want_ to buy their IP? It has cost me more than
a week of work already to decode what Xilinx would not tell me
about their silicon; do you expect me to want to become dependent
on their _code_?! Being dependent on silicon they (or anyone of
the kind) just took over is about enough for me.

>On the other hand, FPGA development software/
>hardware is so expensive, that $2500 is just lost
>in the noise.

Not really. For example, I program my CPLDs using my own
software which runs under DPS; and then I can pretty much do
what I want to my boards using the JTAG tools I have written
(which, as one may guess, use the same DPS objects which the
logic compiler has produced). I spent 3 months on implementing
this which is not cheap; but I guess it did pay off the first
month of its employment because of the benefits one has if
one has access to any level of the design; and, btw, getting
familiar with an alien product won't be much shorter that 3 months.

>There is also far too much logic to build one in a reasonable 
>amount  of space without resorting to FPGA's or custom  or gate 
>array logic. 

You will be astonished how much you can fit i b, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria
http://transgalactic.freeyellow.com
Email: tgi@bulnet.bg, tgi_earth@yahoo.com
Phone: 00359/2992/3340, 00359/2/9805997, Fax: 00359/2/9540384