A new watermarking method for soft IP protection

Abstract

In this paper, a simple and efficient watermarking method for soft IP protection is proposed, in which a special watermark module for copyright detection is added to the original hardware description language (HDL) codes to replace a set of selected stable register data. The watermark can survive after synthesis, placement and routing to protect the soft IP core at various design levels. The reliability and robustness analysis indicate the proposed method can resist both the removal attacks and forging attacks. Also the experiment results demonstrate that our method is easier to implement at a low hardware overhead compared with the other methods, and the embedded watermark can be detected easily for copyright authentication. Moreover, it could be conveniently integrated in real soft IP cores.