Reverse engineering is mostly to address trade secret and copyright infringement.

Patents can be avoided if you can prove that a patent is "obvious to a practitioner in the field" but that's a highish bar to prove in court and requires expensive lawyers

Nevertheless Synaptics are behaving as arse here and as a purely practical matter should be welcoming people who will bring them more customers for free

A patent is a description of how something is solved, such that someone with expertise can recreate it. That patent then grants a monopoly on that method for a period of 20 years in the US, if you keep paying renewal fees.

The whole reverse engineering clean room thing, is to show no copyright infringement and / or trade secret (primarily trade secret). How could they intentionally copy the code, if they cannot see the code.

Patents are far stronger in that sense, but they do have an expiration date. People independently come up with techniques and infringe patents all the time. Look up the patent litigation history of CRISPR which are still going strong it …

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/nobel-prize-winners...

There’s a million examples.

For context, here’s my company IP Copilot - https://ipcopilot.ai/