My background is in the electronics industry. As such, I spent a fair amount of time reverse engineering end systems (we called them “Tear Downs”), analyzing how those systems were designed. The ultimate goal, for me at least, was to show designers some of the techniques that were in use by their peers. This allows designers working on similar systems or subsystems to take advantage of those techniques.

Taking that technology to a much higher level is a company called TechInsights, who reverse engineer ICs. One key reason to reverse engineer an IC is to determine is someone has violated your patent.

It hadn’t dawned on me until very recently that these same reverse engineering feats would be just as helpful to designers in the medical space. TechInsights is making a name for itself in this market area for a similar reason, for a defense against allegations of patent infringement from competitors. Among other things, the TechInsights technology can be used to determine if a competitor’s comparable product is implementing patented inventions; to benchmark your product against the market; and to identify technology trends and key innovation impacting market dynamics

With all this in mind, we’ll be running a series of articles authored by the experts at TechInsights. These articles will explore the legality, methodology, and application of reverse engineering as it pertains to the intellectual-property (IP) lifecycle.

The first of those articles, Electronics and IP: Part I – Look before you leap, is now on the Medical Electronics Design site.
 
Richard Nass