Detector-based watermarking technique for soft IP core protection in high synthesis design level

Watermarking techniques were introduced into the process of IC design to provide confident proofs of the copyright. Due to the difficulty of applying traditional constraint-based watermarking techniques, we propose a new watermarking method for soft IP core copyright protection, which we called the detector-based technique. In this new approach, the watermarking detector plays an important role. Since the detector transfers the difficulty of solving NP-hard problems in traditional constraint-based approaches to the problem of managing a vast sum of detector data, which concerns mainly well-grounded database theory, our detector-based technique presents a practical support for the industrialization of an IP-reuse platform, on which the copyright issues rely not only on legal means, but also design data itself. We also analyze the feasibility of our detector-based watermarking technique in the last part of the paper.