FPGA fingerprinting techniques for protecting intellectual property

As CAD tools and semiconductor technology improvements increase market opportunities for reusable hardware components, it becomes more important to produce techniques for protecting intellectual property rights. This work presents a method of fingerprinting an FPGA design component, so that products in the field can be used to identify both the component designer as well as the customer of record. These techniques are efficient, have extremely low impact on design quality, and are resistant to tampering.