IP Piracy and IC Overproduction

The persistent trend of device scaling has enabled designers to fit more and more functionality on a system-on-chip (SoC) to reduce overall area and cost of an integrated circuits (ICs). As the complexity has grown exponentially, it is impossible to design a complete SoC by a design house alone. Therefore, the semiconductor industry has shifted gears to the concept of design reuse rather than designing the whole SoC from scratch. Nowadays, the SoC designers obtain licenses for various functional blocks (known as intellectual properties or IPs) for their SoCs to optimize the design process and decrease time-to-market. In parallel, the increased complexity of the fabrication process has resulted in a majority of SoC designers no longer maintaining a fabrication unit (or foundry) of their own. Building and maintaining such fabs for modern SoCs are reported to cost more than several billions of dollars and increasing as technology further scales. Given the increasing cost, the semiconductor business has largely shifted to a contract-foundry business model (horizontal business model) over the past two decades. In this business model, the SoC designers first get licenses for third-party IPs (3PIPs) to be used in their SoC designs, design the SoCs by integrating the various 3PIPs and then outsource the SoC design to the foundries and assemblies for fabrication and packaging to reduce time-to-market and manufacturing costs.

When an untrusted party overuses IPs, or overproduces ICs and sells in the open market, the IP owners or the SOC designers lose any possible revenue that could have been gained from those chips. However, an even bigger concern with these ICs is that of reliability. An IC that uses a pirated IP may create a backdoor to leak secret information to the attacker or disable a system at some critical point in time. In addition, overproduced ICs may simply end up in the market with minimal or no testing for reliability and functionality. These ICs may also find their way into the supply chain for many critical applications, which raises concerns for safety and reliability. Since these ICs have the same name of the SoC designers, their failure would also tarnish company reputation. In addition, an SoC designer may legally purchase a 3PIP core from an IP vendor and then make clones, or illegitimate copies of the original IP. Similarly, untrusted foundries may sell illegal copies of the GDSII files that they receive from SoC designers for fabrication. Further, the integrity of the IP may be at risk. An untrusted SoC designer can add some extra features to those 3PIPs to make them look like a different one and then sell them to another SoC designer. An untrusted SoC designer may also modify a 3PIP to introduce a backdoor or hardware Trojan into the chip.