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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

Creating and encrypting netlists

I am trying to create a design for a customer that is part netlist, that they cannot edit, investigate or reverse engineer and part VHDL. They bought an algorithm that integrates into one of our boar...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
17 years ago

A .qxp is not encrypted, but it is a binary format(i.e. it's not clear text for the design). Users can look at the contents in the technology map viewer and chip planner(the RTL viewer will show the same thing as the technology map viewer since the .qxp is post-synthesis, so high-level ideas like muxes will really just be a sea of LUTs and FFs). Bottom line is that it's do-able, but it would be really difficult.

In the next release, coming out any day now, I believe there will be (.QXP as source), where you just give them the .qxp and it is read in directly. Right now you need to give them HDL(just a black-box wrapper).