Stego-signature at logic synthesis level for digital design IP protection

This paper presents a logic re-synthesis method for embedding the IP designer information into a distributed copy of a master design that has been synthesized to meet the application constraints. Slack information of the master copy is used to identify seed cells and extract their kernels for watermark insertion at the logic synthesis level. The embedded watermark can be recovered by comparing the topological mismatches between the marked circuit and the master copy. We demonstrate the difficulty of embedding or removing the watermark. The method has been tested on several MCNC multi-level logic synthesis benchmarks. Experimental results show that the method possesses high embedding capacity with trivial quality overhead for the synthesized solution.