Hardware Intellectual Property Research Articles

Chumby: An Experiment in Hackable Pervasive Computing

As computers become more pervasive, they become more personal. The ultimate pervasive computer would be as unique as the individual it serves. Unfortunately, consumer products are typically closed to protect the manufacturer's intellectual property - a policy choice that hampers user's ability to customize products to fit their unique environments. The chumby is a pervasive computing device and novel business model that were designed to explicitly enable hackers (or lead consumers) to customize their experience and participate in the hardware intellectual property ecosystem through a unique end user license. The chumby ecosystem is architected such that sharing the product's plans with end users doesn't adversely affect the product's commercial viability. Indeed, by exposing this lens of engineering to end users, Chumby Industries' customers actually add value to and help define the company's product.

Component-based development of radio systems and subsystems: Are we there yet? [Trends in DSP

The June 2005 "Trends in DSP" column explored the concept of component-based development for radio systems and subsystems. In this model the intermediate frequency (IF) and baseband signal processing associated with each wireless air interface standard on a given radio product are created from encapsulated software, hardware, and firmware intellectual property (IP) that can be reused from product to product.

Effective Iterative Techniques for Fingerprinting Design IP

Fingerprinting is an approach that assigns a unique and invisible ID to each sold instance of the intellectual property (IP). One of the key advantages fingerprinting-based intellectual property protection (IPP) has over watermarking-based IPP is the enabling of tracing stolen hardware or software. Fingerprinting schemes have been widely and effectively used to achieve this goal; however, their application domain has been restricted only to static artifacts, such as image and audio, where distinct copies can be obtained easily. In this paper, we propose the first generic fingerprinting technique that can be applied to an arbitrary synthesis (optimization or decision) or compilation problem and, therefore to hardware and software IPs. The key problem with design IP fingerprinting is that there is a need to generate a large number of structurally unique but functionally and timing identical designs. To reduce the cost of generating such distinct copies, we apply iterative optimization in an incremental fashion to solve a fingerprinted instance. Therefore, we leverage on the optimization effort already spent in obtaining previous solutions, yet we generate a uniquely fingerprinted new solution. This generic approach is the basis for developing specific fingerprinting techniques for four important problems in VLSI CAD: partitioning, graph coloring, satisfiability, and standard-cell placement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new fingerprinting-based IPP techniques on a number of standard benchmarks.