Entropy-reduced hashing for physical IP management

A system employing entropy reduction on layout data to manage and track physical intellectual property (IP) is presented. Using a combination of symbolic encoding, canonical reduction, lossless compression and cryptographic hash functions, this system provides an efficient, scalable, robust and extensible method for tracking geometrical layout from design through manufacturing and into production. This paper provides a novel systematic layout hashing scheme for use in layout IP management and tracking. The system has been implemented and runtime statistics are provided.