Intellectual property metering

Abstract. We have developed the first hardware and software (intellectual property) metering scheme that enables reliable low overhead proofs for the number of manufactured parts and copied programs. The key idea is to make each design slightly different d

Intellectual Property Metering

Farinaz Koushanfar1, Gang Qu2, Miodrag Potkonjak3

1 EECS Dept., UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720 {farinaz@eecs.berkeley.edu}

2 ECE Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 {gangqu@eng.umd.edu}

3 CS Dept., UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 {miodrag@cs.ucla.edu}

Abstract. We have developed the first hardware and software (intellectual prop-

erty) metering scheme that enables reliable low overhead proofs for the number

of manufactured parts and copied programs. The key idea is to make each design

slightly different during postprocessing phase. Therefore, if two identical hard-

ware/software designs or a design that is not reported by the foundry are detected,

the design house has proof of misconduct.

We start by establishing implementation requirements for hardware metering.

We also establish the connection between the requirements for hardware and

software metering and synthesis process. Furthermore, we present mathematical

analysis of statistical accuracy of the proposed hardware and software metering

schemes. The effectiveness of the metering scheme is demonstrated on a number

of designs and programs.

1 Introduction

1.1 Motivation, Key Idea, and Objectives

Our main goal in this paper is to introduce the first technique for hardware and software metering. The importance of these techniques is paramount for hardware and software intellectual property (IP) protection. It is estimated that more than $5B is lost annually to illegal manufacturing of integrated circuits. The number is significantly higher for illegal software reproduction related losses. These numbers are bound to increase rapidly, in par-ticular for the hardware segment.

Hardware, design and semiconductor companies have been historically vertically integrated. Companies like IBM, Intel and NEC have both leading edge designs as well as superior foundry facilities. However, in the last five years there have been dramatic changes. The most profitable and fastest growing semiconductor business models have been in horizontally focused companies. On one side, pure contract silicon foundries, such as TSMC, UMC, and Chartered Semiconductor conquered almost 1/3 of all semiconduc-tor world-wide output. On the other side, fabless design houses, such as Xilinx, Altera, Broadcom, and Juniper have been by far the fastest growing companies. There is wide consensus that in the future the horizontally focussed companies will significantly increase their market share.

One of major obstacles in this business model is that design companies do not have control over how many copies of their design are made by silicon foundries. Furthermore, FPGA companies get a significant part of their revenues by selling IPs which can readily be used on any of their chips without paying proper royalties. The case is even more cru-cial for software: once the user has the program, the only guarantee for the distributor that the users would not copy the programs are hardware/software locks and license agree-ments. It is much harder to find the illegal distributor of software since the reproduction sources are not limited. It is of utmost importance for the IP provider to meter the users of its programs. A number of companies consider development of hardware or intellectual property metering crucial for their business [37]. VSIA (Virtual Socket Initiative Alliance)