The subject of study in this article is modern FPGA technologies for creation of projects and providing them as a services, as well as solutions for ensuring digital rights management of individual instances of the system. The goal is to analyze and improve technologies for ensuring the work of licensing mechanisms and prevention of unauthorized execution of IP-cores involved in the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in FPGA. Task: to analyze the process of prototyping artificial intelligence systems and providing them as a services using FPGA; to perform an analysis of the possibility of the implementation of a rental mechanism for artificial intelligence as a service based on FPGA with licensing of individual instances of the system; to analyze the possibilities of code protection for the description of the implementation of service rental mechanisms directly in the FPGA; to perform research of possible candidate elements that allow uniqueness identification of individual instances of the system or FPGA chip; and to provide practical example of the application of mechanisms for ensuring digital rights management for creation of artificial intelligence as a service project in FPGA. According to the tasks, the following results were obtained. The analysis of technological capabilities, tools and development environments, description and programming languages for the creation of artificial intelligence systems in the form of a service with hardware implementation is performed. The components of each level of FPGA-based AI service implementation are analyzed. An analysis of possible directions for ensuring digital rights management for AI services projects in FPGA is performed. The possibility of protecting the source code of the description of hardware solutions for the possibility of distribution using the IEEE-1735 encryption standard is analyzed. The integration of the encryption standard with the development environments is discussed. A search of options and possible solutions to ensure identification of the specific instance of the project based on FPGA chip is performed. A practical study of the use of the existing solution from Accelize company for ensuring digital rights management for IP-cores of projects for FPGA is performed. Conclusions. The main contribution and scientific novelty of the obtained results is in the provided results of the research of possible candidate elements that allow the detection of differences and identification of the FPGA uniqueness for the identification of the instance of the system. The proposed method of processing of data from the implementation of physical unclonable functions (PUF) in FPGA to ensure digital rights management is a principal new approach. The given relations between the levels of implementation of AI as a service based on FPGA show the hierarchy of components when building of such system.
