All Digital Low Power Aging Sensor for Counterfeit Detection in Integrated Circuits
Enahoro Oriero, Syed Rafay Hasan · 2018
The globalization of the integrated circuit (IC) design flow has led to increased security vulnerabilities. Modern IC supply chain consists of multiple untrusted entities which makes it vulnerable to potential compromise by attackers, who can insert counterfeit ICs at any stage in the supply chain. The deployment of counterfeit ICs threatens the security and reliability of electronic components and systems. For this reason, it is imperative to mitigate these risks by developing robust counterfeit IC detection techniques. In this paper, we investigated the viability of a completely digital design technique for identifying counterfeit ICs by exploiting changes in the threshold voltage. We introduce a solution that is based on the premise that a recycled/remarked or reused IC exhibits a degraded threshold voltage (Vt) that leads to changes in the timing characteristics of CMOS designs. In contrast to currently available counterfeit IC detection techniques, the proposed method measures IC degradation after it has been used and does not require a reference IC to provide a baseline signature. We propose a robust aging sensor for detecting changes in Vt with a sensitivity of about 5%. The proposed solution is implemented on a 45nm predictive technology model (PTM). The simulation results demonstrate that our design requires power overhead of about 9.2%, which is lower when compared to the next best existing solution to the best of our knowledge.