In all cases with design data, some data
is more revealing about a company's competitive strength
than the rest. Today, a company can encrypt a design
data file for data transmission purposes. However, to
use the data on the other end, the encrypted file must
be decrypted thus giving access to all of the data to
whomever the trusted third party is.
With GDSII, one can only fully encrypt
the file. With OASIS, one can encrypt portions of the
file and keep them encrypted even when compiling,
running design operations or viewing the unencrypted
portions of the data file.
The encrypted portions can be decrypted
on the fly if the CAD tool has permission to decrypt
those portions. Therefore, sensitive data can remain
inaccessible to everyone else who does not have a need
to know and remain inaccessible to any tool which does
not have permission to use the data.
Oasis Tooling developed this as
stand-alone software. It is called PSE Encrypter and
is part of our translators as well. Translators such as
GDSII to OASIS (OASIS to GDSII), OpenAccess to OASIS
(OASIS to OpenAccess). With our technology, a user can
partial-selectively encrypt by cell names and IP
provider, by layers (such as a via layer for mask
programmability), regions on a chip and properties on
geometric elements.
