A Method for Hardware Metering

In this paper we present a hardware metering method to meter or monitor legitimate use of integrated circuits embedded in a computer system. The motivation for this work comes from fabless semiconductor design business/operation model which has become very effective and popular in last few years. A fabless design house produces a design and gives it to a foundry to manufacture the final chip. Once design masks are with the foundry, the original designer has no effective control over the number of copies of the chip that are produced by foundry. We present a finite state machine based automated hardware metering technique to control the use of chip regardless of the number of copies being manufactured. Key-Words: Hardware Metering, Intellectual Property Protection