Identification of IP Control Units by State Encoding

Synchronous finite state machines (FSMs) are the backbone of an embedded controller design. Partially due to the reuse of design in System on Chip (SOC), there has been the growing need for protecting hardware design intellectual property (IP). We propose non-destructive embedding method for protecting the design IPs of an embedded controller modeled as a synchronous FSM. Unlike many other embedding schemes which require adding non-functional states and/or state transitions, the proposed method does not require such additions. The central idea is based on embedding a designer's watermark at a FSM-level, as opposed to a state level. The embedding process is done by a hierarchical state encoding method. The proposed method is favorably evaluated in most of the criteria used in the field of hardware IP protection.