A comprehensive metering scheme for intellectual property protection during both after-sale and evaluation periods of IC design

作者：Pan, Aobo^*; Lin, Yaping; Che, Wenjie; You, Zhiqiang; Liu, Yonghe; Li, Jinguo

来源：IEICE Electronics Express, 2013, 10(19): 20130649.

DOI：10.1587/elex.10.20130649

• intellectual property protection (IPP)
• IC design
• hardware metering
• finite state machine (FSM)
• physically unclonable PUF)

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive scheme that simultaneously achieves IP protection in both after-sale and evaluation periods. Our key idea is to build a pre-verification path into an active metering structure, with a non-functional defect purposely attached to the path, rendering any potential pirating users unwilling to risk the defective behavior of the fabricated chips. Using the MCNC' 91 benchmarks, we achieve a large area-to-power ratio proving the feasibility of our scheme. At the same time, compared with a well-known metering scheme, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the robustness against brute-force attack, roughly by an average value of 2(7.4) per layer. The scheme can also reduce the area and power overhead by 4.4% and 11.2% on average considering an extra 5 to 10 layers.

• 出版日期2013
• 单位湖南大学