20 Years Of Research On Intellectual Property Protection

VLSI intellectual property (IP) reuse based design methodology was adopted by the semiconductor industry in the early 1990's and how to protect design IPs from piracy and misuse has since been a challenging problem. 2017 marks the 20th anniversary of the IP protection development and working group was founded and the first series of IP watermarking papers were published. In this paper, we survey the efforts from industry, government, and academia on securing the design IPs in the past 20 years with focus on development from academia side.