Multilevel Watermark for Protecting DSP Kernel in CE Systems [Hardware Matters]

The intellectual property (IP) core for digital signal processors (DSPs) is vulnerable to IP cloning, IP piracy, and ownership abuse. This article presents a hybrid architectural and register-transfer level (RTL) watermark for DSP IP cores to safeguard against these threats. The watermarking constraints are decoded from the owner?s multivariable signature, where each variable indicates an encoded meaning. A case study is presented showing the complete watermarking process for a seventh-order finite impulse response (FIR) filter and its corresponding implementation.