Localized watermarking: methodology and application to template mapping

The semiconductor industry has adopted the intellectual property (IP) business model as a dominant system-on-chip development platform. Since copyright fraud has been recognized as the most devastating obstruction to this model, a number of techniques for IP protection have been introduced. Most of them rely on a selection of a global solution to an optimization problem according to a unique user-specific digital signature. Although such techniques may provide convincing proof of authorship with little hardware overhead, they fail to protect design partitions, do not provide an easy procedure for watermark detection, and are not capable of detecting the watermark when the design or its part is augmented in another larger design. Since these demands are of the highest interest for the IP business, we introduce localized watermarking as an IP protection technique which enables these features while satisfying the demand for low-cost and transparency. We have applied the new watermarking technology to template mapping, a behavioral synthesis task. This watermarking method has been tested on a set of real-life benchmarks where high likelihood of authorship has been achieved with negligible overhead in solution quality