Copy detection for intellectual property protection of VLSI designs
Andrew B. Kahng, Darko Kirovski, Stefanus Mantik, Miodrag Potkonjak, Jennifer L. A. Wong · 1999
We give the first study of copy detection techniques for VLSI CAD applications; these techniques are complementary to pre-vious watermarking-based IP protection methods in finding and proving improper use of design IP. After reviewing related litera-ture (notably in the text processing domain), we propose a generic methodology for copy detection based on determining basic ele-ments within structural representations of solutions (IPs), calculat-ing (context-independent) signatures for such elements, and per-forming fast comparisons to identify potential violators of IP rights. We give example implementations of this methodology in the do-mains of scheduling, graph coloring and gate-level layout; experi-mental results show the effectiveness of our copy detection schemes as well as the low overhead of implementation. We remark on open research areas, notably the potentially deep and complementary in-teraction between watermarking and copy detection. 1