[vhdl-200x-ft] IP protection - restrictions on tools

Folks,

One of the concerns raised about the IP encryption proposal was that
it does not specify details about several aspects of hiding protected
IP content from users.

The intent of the current proposal is to provide a portable mechanism
that can be used for hiding protected regions of code. It is left to
the tools that consume protected code to specify how they use the
decrypted information, what aspects they will or will not reveal to
users, and what other functionality (eg SDF, configurations) will
work. IP vendors would anyway evaluate how much protection any given
tool provides before they decide to use it.

Specifying how tools should handle protected code can get messy if we
attempt to do it within the VHDL standard. Most of the issues we need
to address simply don't belong within the scope of a language
specification. Ideally, tool behavior should be handled by a separate,
encompassing standard. Till we have such a standard, I it may be best
to let tools decide how they want to handle protected code.

Regards,

-ajay
Received on Tue Jun 8 03:59:41 2004