Trusted Design in FPGAs

Using FPGAs, a designer can separate the design process from the manufacturing flow. Therefore, the owner of a sensitive design need not expose the design to possible theft and tampering during its manufacture, dramatically simplifying the process of assuring trust in that design. Modern FPGAs include bitstream security features that turn the fielded design trust problem into an information security problem, with well-known cryptographic information security solutions. The generic nature of the FPGA base array allows the validation expense to be amortized over all designs targeted to that base array. Even the task of checking design tools is simplified by using non-destructive checks of the FPGA design.