A Pay-per-Use Licensing Scheme for Hardware IP Cores in Recent SRAM-Based FPGAs

Currently achievable intellectual property (IP) protection solutions for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are limited to single large "monolithic" configurations. However, the ever growing capabilities of FPGAs and the consequential increasing complexity of their designs ask for a modular development model, where individual IP cores from multiple parties are integrated into a larger system. To enable such a model, the availability of IP protection at the modular level is imperative. In this work, we propose an IP protection mechanism for FPGA designs at the level of individual IP cores, by making use of the self-reconfiguring capabilities of modern FPGAs and deploying a trusted third party to run a metering service, similar to the work of Guneysu et al. and Drimer et al. The proposed scheme makes it possible to enforce a pay-per-use licensing scheme which holds considerable advantages, both for IP core providers as well as for system integrators. Moreover, the scheme has a minimal implementation overhead and is the first of its kind to be solely based on primitives that are already available in recent commercially available FPGA devices. This allows for an immediate and feasible deployment, in contrast to earlier proposed solutions.