过分伤痛3 Preliminaries
3.1 Problem Scenario
Consider the following scenario that requires hardware metering: a start-up design company A builds a system that outperforms all the similar products on the market. A gives the VHDL description of the system to manufacturer B and makes an agreement with B to fabricate 10 million copies. The first 2 million copies sold out almost immedi-ately, then the sale slows down even when company A lowers the price. It seems the mar-ket has already been saturated. Meanwhile, market survey shows that there are about 12 million similar products in use. A suspects that foundry B has violated the agreement and fabricated more than 10 million copies without reporting to A. However, for a given prod-uct, A cannot provide convincing evidence to tell whether this copy is legally sold or not. Therefore, A fails to recover its R&D revenue.
We observe that the problem comes from the fact that A sells identical products on the market. If they can give each product a unique identification number, then when two prod-ucts with the same identification number are found, the existence of unauthorized
