Testing-Based Watermarking Techniques for Intellectual-Property Identification in SOC Design

Abstract

The author proposes a novel testing-based watermarking scheme for intellectual-property (IP) identification in this paper. The principles are established for the development of new watermarking IP-identification procedures that depend on current IP-based design flow. The core concept is embedding a watermark-generating circuit (WGC) and a test circuit into the IP core at the behavior design level. Therefore, this scheme can also successfully survive synthesis, placement, and routing and can identify the IP core at various design levels. This method adopts current main system-on-a-chip (SOC) design-for-test (DFT) strategies. The identity of the IP is proven during the general test process without implementing any extra extraction flow. After the chip has been manufactured and packaged, it is still easy to detect the identification of the IP provider without the need to examine the microphotograph. On real designs, our approaches entail low hardware overhead, tracking costs, and processing-time costs. The proposed method solves the IP-identification problem.