Low-Overhead Robust RTL Signature for DSP Core Protection: New Paradigm for Smart CE Design

Abstract

The design process of smart Consumer Electronics (CE) devices heavily relies on reusable Intellectual Property (IP) cores of Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and Multimedia Processor (MP). On the other hand, due to strict competition and rivalry between IP vendors, the problem of ownership conflict and IP piracy is surging. Therefore, to design a secured smart CE device, protection of DSP/MP IP core is essential. Embedding a robust IP owner’s signature can protect an IP core from ownership abuse and forgery. This paper presents a covert signature embedding process for DSP/MP IP core at Register-transfer level (RTL). The secret marks of the signature are distributed over the entire design such that it provides higher robustness. For example for 8th order FIR filter, it incurs only between 6% and 3% area overhead for maximum and minimum size signature respectively compared to the non-signature FIR RTL design but with significantly enhanced security.