Legal Problem Research On Reverse Engineering Of Integrated Circuit

During the development process of the integrated circuit industry, reverse engineering is in common used. On the one hand, reverse engineering is very favorable to design an integrated circuit product with the same basal function as the original one, but with better performance, smaller size and lower cost, thereby promoting the technological advancement of the integrated circuit industry. On the other hand, reverse engineering does not violate the fair competition principle excessively, so all the country acknowledge reverse engineering as a legitimate behavior in their law of the protection of the integrated circuit, and it also means that reverse engineering is now becoming an important defense for the integrated circuit infringement.However, reverse engineering is the crack to other's key technology, and the final layout design is hard to avoid the imitation and copy to the original layout design and to identify the difference between the reverse engineering and the infringement, this will lead to the dispute, so it is necessary to make a clear definition of the reverse engineering and infringement. It will protect the legitimate right of the owner of the layout design and help the reverse engineer to estimate the risk of his behavior, and it will benefit the healthy and continuous development.Based on the description of the basic concept of the integrated circuit, layout design and reverse engineering, this paper focuses on the integrated circuit infringement test and reverse engineering test, and it clarify the difference between the infringement and reverse engineering.