A low-overhead dynamic watermarking scheme on scan design for easy authentication

This paper proposes a new dynamic watermarking scheme during the Design-for-Testability (DfT) stage. The extra design constraints due to watermark are imposed on the connection styles between some scan cells. As the scan chain order is maintained, no routing overhead is caused. It thus overcomes the weakness of the watermarking schemes based on scan chain reordering, which usually incur unpredicted long routing or even congestion during physical design. Most of the performances are not compromised. Experimental results show that only negligible overhead on test power is caused while a strong authorship proof is achieved.