1. Intellectual Property (On FPGAs) What is it? How is it applied? Where is it utilized?

2. Basic Definition Intellectual property rights: Allows persons to own there designs and innovations in the same manner in which one owns physical property. It allows for the owner to control the use of their creativity and to be rewarded when others utilize their IP, encouraging future inventions and innovation. With regard to FPGAs, intellectual property refers to IP cores which perform specific functions on chips programmed with the use of tools, such as, VHDL and modelsim environments. Although IP cores are still talked about as a new and emerging technology, third party reusable IP has been around for about 20 years now. Though most people in the dotcom age may use IP to refer to Internet Protocol, the term IP is becoming more widely recognized as intellectual property, especially among those is the digital electronics industry.

3. History of IP ( www.edn.com) The first form of IP which was readily available to designers were Verification models. The models which emerged from around the mid 80s were specific to certain simulators and emulators which had there own specific language, making them very inflexible. However, with the introduction of VHDL and Verilog, a platform was now present for designers to fabricate designs which could actually be reused by anyone suitably trained in the use of these design tools. This would ultimately lead increased the usability and lifespan of the designs themselves. The introduction of logic synthesis provided another market opportunity for "ready-made functional blocks," because few designers had the training or expertise to efficiently use synthesis. Often, the circuits that untrained designers produced were not optimal in size or speed. In 1991, to support its synthesis-marketing effort, Synopsys obtained a small library of logic cells from an engineer as the basis for a DesignWare library of modules. The DesignWare product, now enhanced and expanded to meet the capabilities of current logic-synthesis products, is still successful. Just one year before the introduction of DesignWare, a small company, HDL Systems, sold the architectural rights to the MIPS R3000 CPU under license from MIPS as a synthesizable module. HDL Systems produced both Verilog- and VHDL-synthesizable models of the CPU and sold it as source code with the appropriate synthesis scripts for a $256,000 one-time license fee. Although the company had surprisingly good sales considering its pioneering status, it could never obtain financing to expand the product line. Philips Semiconductor eventually purchased the company and used the R3000 to develop derivative products for its semiconductor business.

4. Also in 1991, ARM introduced the ARM6, a microprocessor core sold under license to designers that needed to integrate a processor in their designs. Unlike HDL Systems, ARM found financing from Nippon Investment and Finance in 1993 and is now the world's No. 1 IP provider. Rambus, the second largest IP-product provider, began in 1990 as a developer of a bus specification to improve the connection of DRAM to a microprocessor. The company continues to develop and market interface options for high-speed application-specific architectures. Both established IP providers and many small design teams are offering reusable functional blocks for either outright sale or license to meet system- designer demands. The IP market has grown from a few thousand dollars in 1988 to more than $1 billion in 2003. Jim Tully, vice president and chief of research for the semiconductor sector at Data-quest, says, "In most cases, it does not make sense to design proprietary blocks for functions that are widely available in the IP market. Those functions do not differentiate a product, but they are 'must-have' functions in a system design."

5. Who Uses FPGAs in Design About two-thirds of developers use some sort of custom logic. The automotive industry having the highest demand for such, followed by the aerospace industry. Networking companies are the most difficult customer for custom logic vendors, followed by audio electronics and power generations industries. However, aerospace industries indicate the highest percentage use of FPGA chips in their applications, about 64%. Other industries that highly favoured FPGA use were video (62%), military (59%), and automotive (58%) developers. The lowest FPGA affinity scores came from the security (24%), networking (27%), power-generation (29%), and government (29%) industries. In a survey conducted by Embedded.com, 41% of developers are using one or more FPGA in their current design. Conversely, less than 35% of those who use FPGAs in there designs make use of FPGAs with embedded processors, whether hard or soft. Although Altera and Xilinx have worked hard to include on board processors, in an effort to fabricate the “all in one” chip, these platforms have not received a largely favourable response from industries, with only 18% of those surveyed saying they use such chips.

6. Who Uses FPGAs in Design Figure 1: Custom logic usage (www.Embedded.com)

7. Figure 2: Downloaded FPGA IP The soft-processor alternatives did even more poorly. A little over 14% of FPGA users say they download a "soft" processor into their FPGA. Soft processors are programmed into the device just like any other logic circuit, making them more flexible—and free. Xilinx and Altera practically give away the designs for their soft processors (MicroBlaze and NIOS, respectively) in the hope that FPGA users will adopt them.

8. IP Protection in FPGA Devices Whereas FPGA designs (IP) may take upwards of months to develop, they can be stolen in a matter of seconds. With the increased use of FPGA for system on chip (SOC) applications, protection of intellectual property on FPGA is essential to the preservation of a healthy competitive design environment and financial investment in the industry. Piracy now accounts for about 10 percent of most of the IP products on the market, according to most industry observers. Electronic Retailers Association had already identified about 186 counterfeit IC’s on the market and the International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition stated that US companies lose more than $200 billion in revenue annually due to worldwide copyright, trademark, and trade-secret infringements. Further than that, companies which sell pirated goods have a significant cost advantage over traditional competitors. They require much less investment in research and development, so they unfairly establish a beachhead in new markets and steal market share. In most extreme cases, they can even drive the original developer out of the market entirely.

9. The type of FPGA used in a design significantly affects the overall level of protection that can ultimately be realized for a specific design. Different types of FPGAs offer a variety of security levels, with antifuse devices the most secure, and SRAM-based devices the least. In order to be able to successfully guard against incidents of cloning of devices and reverse engineering by competitors who engage in piracy, engineers need to be aware of the different methods used to clone and reverse engineer designs and also be aware of the benefits that each type of FPGA offers. IP protection depends on the security policies that management puts in place regarding all aspects of design and manufacture. Whether an FPGA is part of a chipset or assembled on a PC board, without proper safeguards the IP inside can be extracted and used to quickly develop a competing product.

10. When FPGAs were primarily used as glue logic, the security of the IP they contained was not a concern. In the present environment, however, FPGAs are growing in density and can handle much higher clock speeds, therefore, they are becoming an effective alternative to ASICs. Many systems now have most, if not all, sensitive IP programmed into an FPGA. As long as a hacker is able to read the FPGA file, they can duplicate the function of the entire system. FPGA vendors have responded by creating devices that contain locking and encryption circuitry to make them secure. While not all protection schemes in use are completely bulletproof, there are many FPGAs available featuring locking circuitry that is very difficult, if not impossible to defeat. There is a wide assortment of FPGAs available today, but in general nonvolatile antifuse and flash FPGA devices are more secure than volatile SRAM-based devices that require an external configuration memory. FPGAs with external memory require that a configuration bitstream be sent from the memory to the FPGA at power-up to configure the FPGA. In an unprotected application, it is a simple task to copy the contents of the external configuration memory enabling the proprietary IP to be cloned. As a result, nonvolatile FPGAs are more secure than volatile FPGAs, because the configuration bitstream is never exposed outside of the device.

11. Antifuse FPGAs are nonvolatile, and the most secure programmable devices available due to the inherent security of the technology and various aspects of the antifuse security structures. Antifuse devices are programmed using a fuse map programming file. The file is loaded to a device programmer, telling the device programmer which fuses to program. The programmer then issues the commands necessary to program the FPGA. Notice that this is different from other types of FPGAs which use a bitstream to program the device. With antifuse FPGAs all of the "intelligence" for programming the device is contained in the programmer, not in the device, so no programming file (or bitstream) is readable from the device. This makes antifuse FPGAs immune to cloning. Many antifuse FPGAs also have security fuses that, once programmed, disable the probe and programming interface on the device, serving to further thwart hackers.

12. Figure 1. Actel flash FPGA security option

13. Antifuse devices are also secure against invasive attacks involving decapping and probing or visually inspecting the part. In an antifuse FPGA, a fuse link is created (rather than blowing a fuse, hence the name antifuse) during programming, but even so it is difficult to invasively attack and clone antifuse FPGAs. This is because fuses are located below layers of metal, making it impossible to view them. The only option is to slice the part along the metal tracks and use an electron microscope (each fuse is only a few angstroms wide) to determine the state of each fuse. In addition, there are several million fuses in even the smallest antifuse FPGA, so an invasive attack is not only futile it is essentially impossible. If the fuse map can be determined through an invasive method, the hacker would still need to reverse engineer the FPGA architecture to know which fuses are used for interconnect, which for logic, and which for clock distribution, etc. It is clear that even a determined hacker faces several insurmountable hurdles when attempting to invasively attack an antifuse FPGA. From a practical perspective, antifuse devices are impossible to clone. It is no surprise that designs developed by industry and government that require the highest degree of IP protection are developed with antifuse devices. Flash FPGAs offer all of the IP protection provided by antifuse devices in terms of non-volatility and having all memory on-chip, and are secure when locked. With a flash device, the application designer writes the configuration bitstream into the part during manufacture of the application and then locks it into the part, increasing the IP security of flash devices, because the configuration bitstream is never exposed or available outside of the device where it can be obtained and cloned.