The development and implementation of intellectual property (IP)
protection mechanisms is of crucial importance for the emerging
reuse-based system design methodology. Maybe even more importantly, it
is such an elegant scientific and engineering challenge that it has
drawn a lot of attention from academia and industry in recent years.
Intellectual Property Protection in VLSI Designs: Theory and
Practice provides an overview of the security problems in modern VLSI
design with a detailed treatment of our newly developed constraint-based
protection paradigm for the protection of VLSI design IPs from FPGA
design to standard-cell placement, from high-level synthesis solutions
to gate-level netlist place-and-rout, and from advanced CAD tools to
physical design algorithms. The problem of VLSI design IP protection is
much more challenging than the protection of multimedia contents or
software, and our protection paradigm is also conceptually different
from the state-of-the-art approaches in those domains.
The key idea in this newly developed IP protection paradigm is to
superimpose additional constraints that correspond to an encrypted
signature of the designer to design/software in such a way that quality
of design is only nominally impacted, while strong proof of authorship
is guaranteed. It consists of three integrated parts: constraint-based
watermarking, fingerprinting, and copy detection. Its correctness relies
on the presence of all these components. In short, watermarking aims to
embed signatures for the identification of the IP owner without altering
the IP's functionality; fingerprinting seeks to provide effective ways
to distinguish each individual IP users to protect legal IP buyers; copy
detection is the method to trace improper use of the IP and demonstrate
IP's ownership.
Intellectual Property Protection in VLSI Designs: Theory and
Practice contains the mathematical foundations for the developed IP
protection paradigm, detailed pseudo-code and descriptions of its many
techniques, numerous examples and experimental validation on well-known
benchmarks, and clear explanations and comparisons of the many
protection methods.
