Protecting Your IP Core - Part 1 Soft IP - Introduction

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Protecting Your IP Core - Part 1 Soft IP - Introduction [Copy link]

Protecting Your IP Core - Part 1 Soft IP - Introduction

With the proliferation of globalized hardware design and manufacturing processes and competition among IP vendors, threats such as IP piracy/counterfeiting, false ownership, etc. are increasing. Therefore, the requirement to protect IP

Over the years, various techniques and strategies have been developed for protecting IP cores. In this brief introduction, we will not cover all of them. Nor will we delve into the details of their working mechanisms and implementations. Instead, we will briefly outline some of the main techniques used only for soft IP cores. As for firmware and hard IP, we will leave them to our next parts - Part II and Part III.

In this series of posts, we will divide our conversation into the following sections:

Protecting Your IP Cores - Part 1 Soft IP, Section 1: Encryption of HDL Code

Protecting Your IP Cores – Part I Soft IP, Part II: Watermarking

Protecting Your IP Cores - Part I: Soft IP, Part III: Obfuscation of Design

Protecting Your IP Cores – Part I Soft IP, Part IV: Fingerprinting

Protecting Your IP Core – Part I Soft IP, Part V: Remote Activation

Protecting Your IP Cores – Part I Soft IP, Section 6: Physically Unclonable Function (PUF)

Protecting Your IP Cores – Part I Soft IP, Section 7: Key Locking Schemes

Protecting Your IP Cores – Part I Soft IP, Section 8: Protecting IP from Leakage

Keep in mind that there is no universal and ideal protection that works for all application cases. Most of the time, we have to consider the application scenario as well as cost, time and manpower availability to develop the best mechanism.

illustrate:

This article is part of the chapter “Part 17 IP Core Protection” in the book “Silicon IP – Not Just Design” by Mark Chen. You can also find more information at the following website.

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