Techniques for intellectual property protection of DSP designs

Recently, numerous watermarking-based techniques for intellectual property protection of DSP artifacts, such as images, compressed and uncompressed audio and video data, and text documents have been proposed. However, the applicability of all techniques proposed until now are limited to digital data and they either implicitly or explicitly exploit the imperfection of human perception to audio and video. We propose the first watermarking technique for protecting the intellectual property of DSP designs. The essence of the technique is the use of additional synthesis constraints to encode the authorship signature. The constraints are selected in such a way that they result in minimal hardware overhead while embedding the signature which is unique and difficult to detect and remove. The technique is applicable to all levels of design process, from the algorithm, system and behavioral synthesis to logic synthesis and physical design levels. The technique is illustrated on a set of DSP design examples on all levels of design process.