An Active Protection Approach for the Intellectual Property of Network-on-Chip

This paper proposes a novel IPP approach for NoC. The designed NoC with some inactive nodes initially cannot work properly. It needs a special data packet with secret key to activate the nodes. Therefore, the approach locks each NoC IP core after design and fulfills the active protection of NoC. The approach is implemented on Noxim simulator. The results show that the approach can protect the intellectual property of NoC effectively.The implementation on FPGA shows low overhead.