Counter based approach to intellectual property protection in sequential circuits and comparison with existing approach

Intellectual property is the most valuable asset of a country, a company or an individual. It takes a lot of hard work, money and countless resources to create intellectual property. As the technology becomes more and more sophisticated, the threats to this invaluable intellectual property increase. The threats can be unprecedented because of the fact that there is a phenomenal increase in level of data stored on servers, hard disks, flash drives etc. There is a great need to protect such an invaluable resource from getting into wrong hands. In order to enable intellectual property protection, a novel counter based watermarking approach is proposed in this paper. With the help of this approach, it is possible to prove the theft of intellectual property in a court of law, hence proving the ownership and retaining the royalty that comes from the use of those inventions. The proposed approach is compared with the existing approach and is shown to be efficient in terms of hardware requirement, invisibility and robustness to the user. The proposed technique causes absolutely no hardware overhead as compared to the existing technique which causes a hardware overhead of 300%.