Newly Formed License Server Certification Task Force
By Paul Cohen, Sr. ESDA Manager, SEMI
The design and manufacture of today’s semiconductor chips is a complex process, requiring advanced software tools throughout the design to manufacturing flow. These tools require a team of talented engineers to develop and maintain. As the industry advances to smaller geometries and heterogeneous integration, new challenges arise requiring more research and development of the software used throughout the design ecosystem. These efforts are funded through the sale and licensing of the software.
One of the ongoing efforts of the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESDA), a SEMI Technology Community, is the License Management and Anti-Piracy Committee (LMA). Part of the committee’s purpose is to help reduce the incidence of unauthorized use (piracy) of this complex software. Unauthorized use negatively impacts both the tool vendors and customers. It deprives the software developers of revenue for their continuing efforts to develop new products that address the increasingly complex design ecosystem. Software piracy impacts the legitimate users of the software in two ways. First, the vendors may need to increase prices to be able to continue their R&D of new products and functionality. Second, it provides an unfair competitive advantage to those companies who are not paying for the software.
Legitimate use of licensed software is often regulated by license server software, which relies on a specific characteristic of the host machine such as the MAC address or other unique identifier. A common technique of software pirates is to create a clone of the host machine, allowing them to run more copies of the software than authorized.
To eliminate the impact of host ID cloning, the ESDA’s LMA Committee has developed a Server Certification Protocol that will allow software vendors to ensure that only valid license servers are allowed to issue licenses. While this protocol is being developed by companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry, it is not specific to EDA software. Thus, other licensed software vendors can also benefit from this protocol.
During the development of this protocol, the working group has consulted with representatives of major users of licensed EDA software. They provided valuable input during the development process and approved the deployment of the SSCP by their respective EDA suppliers.
To transition this activity into a SEMI Standard, the group has formed a License Server Certification Task Force under the North America Metrics Technical Committee and is currently working on a protocol for a SEMI Standard.
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Standards Watch
SEMI
www.semi.org
March 16, 2023