Opening up the Black Box:The Semiconductor Industry’s Protected IP Initiative

When?

Wednesday 21 March 2007, 14:00 to 15:00

Where?

39BB02

Open to:

Students, Staff

Abstract:

Since semiconductor intellectual property (IP) first emerged on the integrated circuit (IC) design scene over a decade ago, it has promised to shave months off of development time while allowing for the inclusion of many more functions in a design.
In reality, however, it has fallen short of fulfilling its promise largely owing to integration issues and the legal difficulties and necessary paranoia on the part of the IP providers to protect their investment. The vulnerability of the source of the silicon IP, usually in VHDL or Verilog Hardware Descriptions, has stifled its widespread use by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) and especially in the most popular IC technology, namely FPGA. To address the need for a means to protect IP from piracy while making it easier for the IP supplier to deploy and the IC designer to use, Synplicity has developed and introduced an open IP encryption/decryption methodology. It takes advantage of commonly used encryption mechanisms in a new usage model that embeds IP Protection into every stage of the IC Implementation toolchain.

This technology has been donated to the Virtual Socket Industry Alliance (VSIA), a Semiconductor Industry body comprising the leading IP suppliers and FPGA Vendors . A special interest group within VSIA been formed with the aim of reviewing the IP Protection methodology and proposing it as an industry standard. This presentation will summarise the issues and explain the novel embedding of encryption into the IP creation, RTL synthesis, Simulation and Place&Route of FPGA and ASIC.
This method was a finalist in the 2006 IET Innovaton Awards (beaten to the final prize by Surrey University’s own project for Photographic IP Protection).

Notes:

Doug Amos: Director of European Business Development, Synplicity inc.
Doug was the first engineer and technical director for Synplicity in Europe in the Mid-1990s. His positions at Synplicity have also included responsibility for all ASIC and FPGA FAE (Field Application Engineering) support for Synplicity in Europe.

Prior to joining Synplicity, Mr. Amos held various consulting and engineering positions working with Actel, Altera, and Xilinx. Mr. Amos has over 20 years experience in the field of FPGA and ASIC design.