A tool for automatic watermarking of IP designs

Intellectual property (IP) block reuse is essential for facilitating the design process of system-on-a-chip (SOC). Sharing IP blocks in such a competitive market poses significant high security risks. Digital watermarking, used with most of the shared digital media, has emerged as a candidate solution for helping copyright protection of IP blocks. In this paper, we present an automatic tool for watermarking sequential IP designs. The tool is based on the idea of utilizing unused transitions in the state transition graph (STG) to add a part of the watermark. The tool also tries to create a supraliminal channel by utilizing the already existing transitions. The paper describes the structure of the tool, overviews the algorithms used in its components, and reports experimental results obtained by applying it on a set of benchmarks.