It turns out a team of 10 in a few months can reimplement a small microcontroller from just the public documentation of a competitor. By being 100% compatible, customers can move across without any engineering work, and you can reuse the same toolchain.
I doubt either the manufacturer or their customers will have any legal issues.
On the other hand, you probably will have issues when the original and the clone differ slightly or have different bugs.
It turns out a team of 10 in a few months can reimplement a small microcontroller from just the public documentation of a competitor. By being 100% compatible, customers can move across without any engineering work, and you can reuse the same toolchain.
I doubt either the manufacturer or their customers will have any legal issues.
On the other hand, you probably will have issues when the original and the clone differ slightly or have different bugs.