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IP Theft Continues
By Ed Sperling -- Electronic News, 2/8/2006
Intellectual property protection is about to get some help in the way of new technology, which can serve as watermarks or identify when changes were added, by whom and exactly when.
But those protections will only work in the open global market, where additions can be tracked. In large domestic markets, such as China, IP theft will be virtually untraceable by outside companies. And for a $1.8 billion market that is growing by leaps and bounds as time-to-market pressures increase, this remains a serious problem.
“It’s a function of the size of the internal market,” said Joachim Kemper, VP of engineering in Synopsys’ solutions group. “By the time they export it, they may get into trouble.”
But Kemper said that could take years. He said the best protection is to perform due diligence on partners using IP and determine their track record.
A panel of experts at DesignCon yesterday said that using trusted partners was by far the best protection, despite the new technology that will begin showing up in coming months.
“We do check out our partners,” said Mark Gogolewski, CTO at Denali. He said that can be relatively easy in some cases, because the cost of developing chips means many potential partners are well-capitalized and have reputations to uphold. But that doesn’t address all of them, and he said at least part of the burden falls back to an understanding of what IP really is and how to manage it.
“Part of the problem here is the cost of IP ownership,” he said. “You have to understand it and implement it in silicon, and you have to force the industry to segment it into cleaner and cleaner pieces. IP use is accelerating. IP was a question of opportunity in the past. Now it’s a question of imperative. At the same time the quality is going up.”
But no matter how many protections are added, IP is still risk for illegal use. The problem is greatest for software and firmware, but even complex hardware can be copied over time.
Some of that risk stems from companies or people that intentionally want to steal it. Some of it also is from people who unintentionally pass it along to other developers without understanding the legal restrictions on sharing code.
Experts said all the technologies for preventing illegal handoffs are flawed, even though they make it more difficult to cheat. While a public key encryption works on the handoff of the technology, companies buying IP for complex chips frequently demand access to the source code so they can examine it and modify it, as needed. “If you’re shipping more than 20,000 gates, customers want the source code,” Kunkel said.
