January 26, 2009 -- IP core providers are increasingly aware of the need to protect their investment from either unintended or unlicensed usage of their IP core blocks. This would require identification of IP core blocks from any SoC. IP core identification is not a trivial task and it involves different approaches depending on the nature of IP cores.

In this paper, Semiconductor Insights shows some noble ways of identifying IP cores from any SoC products to protect the interest of IP core providers. Techniques developed by Semiconductor Insights to identify IP core blocks include methods such as circuit extraction using advanced delayering techniques, layout comparisons, automatic recognition and extraction of standard cells and blocks of designs, netlist generation from the extracted circuits, use of circuit library to identify IP blocks, use of structural data mining algorithm for netlist comparison, and device and system level testing to identify IPs involving algorithms and system level protocols.

By Jason Abt, Val Gont, Vyacheslav Zavadsky, and Young Choi. (All are with Semiconductor Insights, Inc.)