Over the past three years, the ESD Alliance’s License Management and Anti-Piracy (LMA) Committee has worked with member companies Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys to develop a protocol for use with software license management systems to provide strong protection against piracy by defining how servers can be uniquely identified.

Sashi Subramanian, senior group director at Cadence, chairs the LMA and leads the development of the SEMI Server Certification Protocol. In my recent conversation with Sashi, we discuss the driving factors behind the creation of this new protocol, the challenges of bringing it to market and a status update.

Smith: What is a server certification protocol? What is its purpose?

Subramanian: The protocol is a means by which compute servers that run license server software can be uniquely identified. The purpose is to thwart software piracy that relies on cloning server identifications by allowing only entitled instances of license server software to run.
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