Terms of use

1. Who provides the service

The tools are provided by controlpaths, the author of controlpaths.com. You can reach us at info @ the domain you are. The service is offered free of charge, as a beta, and may change, be limited or be discontinued at any time without notice.

2. Fair use and limits

Each client can send one request every 30 seconds to each tool action (for example, one filter design, or one register-map proposal and one RTL generation in the AXI Slave tool). Requests above that rate are refused. You agree not to work around this limit, not to query the tools in bulk or with automated scripts, not to scrape the results, and not to use the service to attack, overload or probe the server. We may block clients that do so.

3. What we record

For every request made to a tool we keep a log entry with:

• the input you sent: the filter specification, the peripheral description, the register map and the options you chose;
• the result the tool produced: the generated RTL, coefficients, register map, verification and resource figures;
• the date and time, the tool used, the outcome and how long it took;
• your browser's user agent and the version of these terms you accepted;
• a pseudonymous client identifier derived from your IP address with a secret key. Your IP address is only used to compute this identifier; it is not stored with your requests.

The site sets no cookies and uses no third-party analytics. Your acceptance of these terms is remembered in your own browser (local storage) so you don't have to tick the box on every visit; it is sent to the server only as the version number of the terms you accepted.

4. How we use it

The log is used to:

• operate the service, apply the rate limit and detect abuse;
• find and fix bugs, and reproduce problems you report;
• improve the service: improve the templates, the verification and the language models behind the tools, build test cases and evaluation sets from real requests, and decide which features to build next. This may include people reading individual requests and results.

By submitting a request you grant us a free, worldwide, non-exclusive and perpetual licence to use your input and the generated output for these purposes. We do not sell your requests, and we will not publish them in a way that identifies you. We may publish aggregate statistics about how the tools are used.

Requests are processed on our own server. The language model that proposes register maps runs on that server too: your inputs are not sent to third-party AI providers.

5. Do not submit confidential information

Because requests are stored and may be reviewed, do not enter anything you are not free to share. In particular, do not submit:

• proprietary or confidential designs, specifications or source code, yours or your employer's;
• information covered by a non-disclosure agreement or belonging to a client;
• trade secrets, unreleased product details or export-controlled technical data;
• personal data about you or anyone else (names, e-mail addresses, and so on) in descriptions or module names;
• passwords, keys or other credentials.

Describe what the block does in generic terms instead. If you need to work on confidential designs, contact us for a private setup.

6. Your results

You may use, modify and distribute the RTL, testbenches and other files the tools generate for you for any purpose, including in commercial products, without attribution. We claim no ownership of your results. The templates and software that produce them remain ours, and similar or identical output may be generated for other users from similar requests.

7. No warranty

The tools and their results are provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. Parts of them are produced by a language model and may be wrong; simulation results apply only to the cases that were simulated; resource figures are estimates from Yosys and will differ from your vendor's tools. You are responsible for reviewing, verifying and testing anything you use, and the results must not be used in safety-critical, medical, automotive, aerospace or similar applications without your own independent verification.

8. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, controlpaths is not liable for any direct or indirect damage arising from the use of the service or its results, including lost profits, lost data, hardware damage or project delays. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

9. Retention and your rights

Log entries are kept for up to 24 months and then deleted or fully anonymised. You can ask for access to, correction or deletion of the requests you made, or object to their use, by writing to info @ the domain you are. Because the log does not hold your IP address, tell us roughly when you used the tool and what you submitted so we can find your requests. More on how controlpaths handles personal data in the privacy policy.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version date at the top of this page changes when we do, and the tools will ask you to accept the new version before your next request.