Rewiring for watermarking digital circuits

A resynthesis method to protect firm cores or circuit netlist representations is presented. The design is protected by embedding a watermark by rewiring the circuit with one or more redundancy addition/removal steps. There is no or negligible area or timing overhead and existing test sets may be presented. We analyze several attack strategies and we experimentally demonstrate that the proof of authorship is guaranteed with very high probability for ISCAS´85 and ITC´99 benchmarks.