Blockchain Technology Enabled Pay Per Use Licensing Approach for Hardware IPs

Abstract

The present era is witnessing a reuse of hardware IPs to reduce cost. As trustworthiness is an essential factor, designers prefer to use hardware IPs which performed effectively in the past, but at the same time, are still active and did not age. In such scenarios, pay per use licensing schemes suit best for both producers and users. Existing pay per use licensing mechanisms consider a centralized third party, which may not be trustworthy. Hence, we seek refuge to blockchain technology to eradicate such third parties and facilitate a transparent and automated pay per use licensing mechanism. A blockchain is a distributed public ledger whose records are added based on peer review and majority consensus of its participants, that cannot be tampered or modified later. Smart contracts are deployed to facilitate the mechanism. Even dynamic pricing of the hardware IPs based on the factors of trustworthiness and aging have been focused in this work, which are not associated in existing literature. Security analysis of the proposed mechanism has been provided. Performance evaluation is carried based on the gas usage of Ethereum Solidity test environment, along with cost analysis based on lifetime and related user ratings.