Watermarking is the embedding of data in a medium for ownership, verification, distribution tracking, authentication, copyright protection, and data hiding. It has been well studied for use in digital media such as audio, digital images, and video. In this work, watermarking was extended to the realm of computer-aided design (CAD) for physical design of integrated circuits (ICs) in order to protect and facilitate re-use of intellectual property (IP) blocks (circuitry). As designs become more complex and cycle times shorter, the re-use of IP blocks is becoming more and more important. However, in order to aid in the re-use, improved methods for securing and tracking ownership need to be in place. Watermarking valuable design blocks, whether custom transistors or standard cells, is a practical method of securing ownership of the property, even after local perturbations in the design. A method of watermarking circuit elements was developed for fully-custom analog or digital macrocell designs as well as analog or digital standard cell based designs. This protection scheme thus applies to analog, digital, and mixed-signal designs, with the only exception being that of gate array implemented circuits.

Unwatermarked op amp and watermarked op amp:

This work was a collaborative effort with the Computer Systems Design Laboratory (director: Prof. Jo Dale Carothers) in the Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Publications:

1. Naveen Narayan, Rexford D. Newbould, Jo Dale Carothers, Jeffrey J. Rodriguez, and W. Timothy Holman, "IP Protection for VLSI Designs Via Watermarking of Routes," in Proc. 14th Annual IEEE Intl. ASIC/SOC Conf., Arlington, VA, Sept. 12-15, 2001, pp. 406-410. [ PDF ]