language: en

Robust IP Watermarking Methodologies for Physical Design

Andrew B. Kahng, Stefanus Mantik, Igor L. Markov, Miodrag Potkonjak, Paul Tucker , Huijuan Wang and Gregory Wolfe
UCLA Computer Science Dept.,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1596
UCSD Computer Science & Engineering Dept.,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114

Abstract Increasingly popular reuse-based design paradigms create a pressing need for authorship enforcement techniques that protect the intellectual property rights of designers. We develop the first intellectual property protection protocols for embedding design watermarks at the physical design level. We demonstrate that these protocols are transparent with respect to existing industrial tools and design flows, and that they can embed watermarks into real-world industrial designs with very low implementation overhead (as measured by such standard metrics as wirelength, layout area, number of vias, routing congestion and CPU time). On several industrial test cases, we obtain extremely strong, tamper-resistant proofs of authorship for placement and routing solutions.

1 Introduction