A digital copyright protection scheme for soft-IP core based on FSMs

Intellectual Property (IP) core reuse is a trend in SOC and IC design. However, sharing IP cores in current competitive market poses significant high security risks due to soft-IPs can be easily copied or even partitioned to cover the ownership proof. In this paper, a digital copyright protection scheme for soft-IP core based on finite-state machines (FSMs) is proposed, in which the authorship of designs can be identified by embedding a digital watermark in the FSMs of the soft-IP during the IC design and detecting the watermark in the authentication process. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme is efficient and robust to attacks and easy to implement without affecting the original performance of the Soft-IP.