ICMarks: A Robust Watermarking Framework for Integrated Circuit Physical Design IP Protection

arXiv:2404.18407v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Physical design watermarking on contemporary integrated circuit (IC) layout encodes signatures without considering the dense connections and design constraints, which could lead to performance degradation on the watermarked products. This paper presents ICMarks, a quality-preserving and robust watermarking framework for modern IC physical design. ICMarks embeds unique watermark signatures during the physical design's placement stage, thereby authenticating the IC layout ownership. ICMarks's novelty lies in (i) strategically identifying a region of cells to watermark with …

arxiv connections constraints cs.ar cs.cr design framework integrated circuit ip protection layout performance performance degradation physical products protection quality signatures watermarking