Soft IP Protection: An Active Approach Based on Hardware Authentication

In today s competitive market, intellectual property (IP) protection plays an important role in the EDA industry because of lots of money invested in designing these cores. Protecting soft IPs is much more challenging because it can be easily copied and even be sold at lower levels of abstraction. In this paper, a new active protecting approach is proposed. Using the sequence of states in the host design s finite state machine, IP venders can embed a checking mechanism in their soft cores in order to actively check if the IP is used in a legal host design (called the environment of the IP). Redistributing and illegally using the protected core will cause incorrect environmental data, making the IP change its original operation into an improper one. Experimental results show that the protecting method can be implemented with low delay and area overheads and without significant overhead of modifying the main design flow.