Intellectual property protection of hardware and software artifacts is of cru- cial importance for a number of dominating business models. Maybe even more importantly‚ it is an elegant and challenging scientific and engineering challenge. This book provides in detailed treatment of our newly developed constraint-based protection paradigm for the protection of intellectual proper- ties in VLSI CAD. The key idea is to superimpose additional constraints that correspond to an encrypted signature of the designer to design/software in such a way that quality of design is only nominally impacted‚ while strong proof of authorship is.
