Automated Signature Insertion in Combinational Logic Patterns for HDL IP Core Protection

This paper presents significant improvements to previous watermarking technique for intellectual property protection (IPP) of IP cores. The technique relies on hosting the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using resources included within the original system. The technique also includes a procedure for secure signature extraction requiring minimal modifications to the system. The new advances refer to increasing the applicability of this watermarking technique to any design and the provision of an automatic tool for signature hosting that, in addition to easy the signature hosting, leads to reduced area penalties. Synthesis results show that the application of the proposed watermarking strategy results in negligible degradation of system performance and very low area penalties.