Even worse, manufacturers consider their fabrication process as private property and anyone want to fabricate his design should give this fabhis design and use his tool only. One of the most important problems with Open hardware designs is the design protection. No one in the world likes to lose give his ideas and work for free unless there is some kind of control and protection for his work. Sugessted solutions Currently open free software developers are rtying to develop good EDA tools such as gEDA, Savant, and the Alliance. As a result hardware designers can use these free tools to develop their hardware designs and so to give the software designers some feedbacks to imporve their tools.
Simulation is one of the important steps of complex hardware design.
Open Hardware designers may simulate their designs only without implementing them. In this way they did the design using free simulators without the cost of implementation. Although it is good approach, but hardwre designs become much useful when they become real device. These devices showed some good examples of real complex designs built using them. They can be programmed in field using a PC or small programmer.