The Semiconductors & Integrated Circuits Layout – Design. The Intellectual Property Rights provide protection to the hardware aspect of any electronic design. The methodology of designing the integrated circuit by interconnecting discrete transistors and other semiconductor materials is basically termed as layout design. The layout design is primarily a utility and is technology driven. To prevent the piracy of the hardware or firmware, The Semiconductor Protection & Integrated circuits Layout – Design is a step towards the protection of electronic hardware designs developed.

In United States, it is also termed as mask work - a two or three-dimensional layout of an integrated circuit (IC or "chip"), i.e. the arrangement on a chip of semiconductor devices such as transistors and passive electronic components such as resistors and interconnections. By extension, it also refers to the intellectual property right conferring time limited exclusivity to reproduction of a particular layout. The layout is called a mask work because, in photolithographic processes, the multiple etched layers within actual ICs are each created using a mask, called the photo mask, to permit or block the light at specific locations, sometimes for hundreds of chips on a wafer simultaneously.