A practical authentication method of FPGA designs suitable for mass production

Traditionally, IC companies were able to protect their IP assets by simply keeping these in safe. However, the new trends such as outsourcing and fabless IC development make the silicon processing and IC development more accessible. Therefore, IC authentication and IP (intellectual property) protection have become real world problems that industry eagerly seeks for efficient solutions. Most of the considerable proposals to these intense problems involve complicated cryptographic schemes and procedures that bring extra burden on system design. Moreover, if the target platform is a constraint environment, this burden is amplified and even the most efficient solutions become infeasible. Therefore, designers tend to use the ad-hoc methods that possibly have serious security risks. In this study, we seek practical solutions for the FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) which represent a relatively small but important subset of hardware IP utilization.