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I think so. It wouldn't be too easy, but should be do-able. When providing a .qxp, it's a binary, but after place-and-route the design isn't encrypted or anything. They could look in the Technology Map Viewer to see what logic is in there(it's not intuitive at all, but again, do-able)
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I've browsed the qxp using the technology map viewer but it seems to me that constant values are some how synthesized away, are you it is doable to find them?
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I have been in this very position, and spoken to altera about it.
Apparetly the only way to go about encrypting at this level would be to join the Altera IP development program or whatever it is (the thing that provides PCI cores and the like) but then your IP becomes available to the world.
Basically there is no way to actually encrypt the QXP file as is, you'll just have to hope they dont try and reverse engineer it (though, if its a fairly involved design, that would take some serious resource that they could probably have used to develop their own version in the first place!)
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assuming that my bosses would agree to making our design open to world(though it is relevant to very narrow market), would altera charge a fee for joining the program?
my main concern is about duplicating our design to more boards then we know of, not reverse engineering (most of the IP is implemented in SW which they get a binary of)
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It would be nice if the .qxp's could be encrypted, basically a button that says this can't be looked at in Altera back-end tools. It wouldn't need a license or anything, it would just do some of the stuff that's already done with the licensed IP. The IP could still be compiled by anyone who had the .qxp file, so it doesn't prevent re-use, it just puts up more roadblocks for reverse engineering. I filed something, but please file an SR too. It won't help today, but might be something down the road...
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I've opened a service request explaining the problem and I'm waiting for a replay.
another thought that came to my head, are there any third part tools that might help me, like precision that creates edf, maybe it is not viewable in the technology map viewer.
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