Constraint-based watermarking techniques for VLSI IP protection
Aijiao Cui · 2009
With the increase, in the popularity of reusable intellectual property (IP) cores for System-on-a-Chip (SoC), piracy is also on the rise in this new design area. The lure of getting a new product ahead of the competitor at a fraction of, or at no cost, is often too much a temptation to ignore, which results in an increasingly buoyant IP theft. To safeguard the IP owner against piracy and illegal redistribution of the IP cores, constraint-based watermarking has been used as a pivotal technology to protect the copyright of the very large scale integration (VLSI) IPs. In this thesis, a comprehensive framework of constraint-based watermarking techniques has been studied and explored at different design abstraction levels. The goal is to develop robust watermarking schemes and techniques for VLSI IP protection that can facilitate easy detection and tracking of IP misappropriation.