Opening up the black box

Since semiconductor intellectual property (IP) first emerged on the integrated circuit (IC) design scene over a decade ago, it has offered the promise of shaving months off of development time while allowing for the inclusion of many more functions in a design. At the heart of the problem is the need by IP providers to protect their development investment. Few IC designers can afford to pay the often high price for access to IP source code, so IP suppliers provide significantly less costly 'black box', or encrypted, versions for use with specific design tools. The problem with this is not only that the IP vendor is saddled with the cumbersome task of maintaining multiple IP core versions for various tool sets, but, more importantly, that it is an incomplete solution. To address the need for a means to protect IP from piracy while making it easier for the IF supplier to deploy and the IC designer to use, Synplicity has developed and introduced an open IP encryption/decryption methodology. It takes advantage of features in the most recent release of Verilog and commonly used encryption mechanisms in a new usage model that could become an industry standard.