IP Protection: A Historical View

With the ever-increasing cost and complexity of the design and fabrication of modern ICs, as well as the ever-increasing recurring cost of maintaining semiconductor fabrication entities, starting the 1980s, VLSI outsourcing and reuse design methodology has been adopted largely by the semiconductor industry. When semiconductor companies started developing complex ICs that required substantial investments in research and development, with outsourcing and reuse in place, the demand for protecting their designs from being copied by competitors (to ensure that they could profit from their investments) became paramount. Starting the 1980s, with the initiation of various forms of IP protection, such as copyright, patents, masking, etc., by the semiconductor industry, companies typically started to use an individual or a combination of such techniques against any form of malicious action. This chapter will focus on the history of IP protection, starting with the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act (SCPA) in 1984, and by showing a few case studies of IP infringement, as well as the efforts accomplished on IP protection by industry, government, and academia, we demonstrate how semiconductor companies adapt their IC supply chain flow with these amendments.