System and Method for IP Fingerprinting and IP DNA Analysis

By _Silvaco Blog

July 29, 2019

In May 2019 Silvaco was awarded a patent for System and method for IP fingerprinting and IP DNA analysis. This patent reflects the unique technology inside the Xena® IP Management System from Silvaco.

What is IP fingerprinting? Fingerprinting allows the detection of individual IP in devices or SoCs. What's interesting about this is, unlike other methods like tagging, there's no modification of the IP or the IC design to support this, and there's no modification of the design flow. It works independently on top of the design data.

How are fingerprints created and what are their properties? They are a digital representation of the IP in a single file. A group of IP source files is scanned to create a fingerprint file. And fingerprints are very, very tiny. They are 75 bytes per file scanned, so if you have a 100 source files for your IP you will have a fingerprint file of about 7.5K. Fingerprints are in text format and supports all kinds of IP and all kinds of files. This include embedded software, images, anything that's a file can be fingerprinted, but Xena has special support for common IP formats. For soft IP, that would be Verilog in VHDL, SystemVerilog and SystemC, for example, and for hard IP, GDSII, and also other types such as embedded software, SQL Plus, C, Java, JavaScript.

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