Antipiracy-Aware IP Chipset Design for CE Devices: A Robust Watermarking Approach [Hardware Matters]

Intellectual property (IP) chip sets are indispensable components of consumer electronics (CE) products, such as set-top boxes, digital televisions, digital video discs (DVDs), tablets, digital cameras, and audio-video receivers. They represent several years of investment, research, and development through expensive infrastructure. Watermarking in IP chip sets for the protection of CE devices against false claims of ownership, piracy, and counterfeiting has proven to be a promising solution. However, the design process of a watermarked (antipiracy-aware) IP chip set is complex, and no published work exists in the literature to introduce a formal design methodology. This column presents a formal design approach for antipiracy-aware IP chip sets for CE devices. Using robust multivariable signature-encoding methodology, decoded watermarking constraints are embedded into the formal architectural synthesis design steps of an IP chip set. Each step of the IP chip set design is lucidly introduced with the aid of a real-life benchmark from the domain of multimedia and digital signal processing.