A hardware efficient watermarking technique based on LFSR

Abstract

Watermarking has been used for many years to protect data in the form of images, text etc. With the increasing use of semiconductor Intellectual Property(IPs) by industries to develop various products, this concept of watermarking has been applied by semiconductor industries as well to protect the VLSI designs which use these semiconductor IPs. There are many watermarking techniques for IP protection of VLSI designs, out of which watermarking of Finite State Machine(FSM) based design is research area. Watermarking technique implemented in this paper uses a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) to watermark a FSM based design. The LFSR based watermarking is applied successfully on a sequence detector and is compared with other FSM watermarking techniques. The simulation and synthesis of LFSR based watermarking is performed using ModelSim and Xilinx ISE tool respectively. Results show improvement in Hardware utilization as compared to other FSM watermarking techniques available in literature.