Silicon technology has now advanced to the point that there is a serious mi
smatch in the time taken to design advanced silicon-based systems and the t
ime to market for any new product or product derivative. To obviate this de
lay, a new paradigm is emerging based on intellectual property (IP) exchang
e, where designers and differing companies share subsystems (virtual cores)
between themselves to reduce design time to acceptable levels. To this end
, over 150 companies including all the major players formed the Virtual Soc
ket Interface Alliance in March 1997, The protection of IP has become a ser
ious issue as intercompany subsystem design exchange becomes more commonpla
ce,
This paper presents new techniques to protect the IP of virtual cores that
implement digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, The approach involves
embedding codewords into the design of fundamental signal processing algor
ithms such as digital filters and the DFT in such a way that proof of autho
rship can be retained, and, if required, easily identified. The techniques
discussed can be adapted to protect other fundamental DSP algorithms such a
s convolution and correlation.
The protection of IP via watermarking techniques is increasingly being appl
ied at all levels of design. It is particularly advantageous if such techni
ques are applied at the highest abstraction levels in the design flow and i
f such techniques are applied at basic algorithm level, they become very di
fficult to detect at lower levels of system design.