Encoding of Floorplans through Deterministic Perturbation

Recent trends in VLSI design involve rapid growth of design reuse and electronic Intellectual Property (IP) commerce. For VLSI physical design, the risk of misappropriation of design IP stored in design repositories, or the threat of hacking the same during its web-based transmission, mandates design file encryption. However, encryption of GDSII/OASIS design files, too large in size and complex in format, is troublesome, time consuming and also prone to typical cryptanalysis. The idea of an alternate efficient approach of encoding by deterministic perturbation of design IP resulting in a degraded design of negligible IP value, is proposed here to ensure security during design storage or transmission. From the highly degraded design only authorized person can quickly regenerate the optimized design. In this paper, the technique for design encoding through perturbation is applied for floorplanning stage. Encoding moves for various floorplan representations are analyzed and a novel technique for encoding tree-based representations is proposed. Experimental results on floorplan perturbation for MCNC benchmarks are encouraging.