Hardware Protection of Design Data for Integrated Circuits: A Review

Abstract

Due to globalization of integrated circuit (IC) design flow, the supply chain elements can pirate ICs, overbuild ICs and insert hardware Trojans. Ending piracy of ICs is locked by inserting additional keys and only a correct key makes the design to produce correct outputs. Test of ICs is essential to ensure their quality; the test is meant to prevent defective ICs from entering into the supply chain. Due to the ever-increasing complexity of constructing and maintaining a foundry with advanced fabrication capabilities, many semiconductor companies are becoming fabless. Hardware obfuscation refers to countermeasures which used to prevent IC counterfeiting and illegal overproduction. Traditionally, obfuscation encrypts semiconductor circuits to operate the circuit correctly by using key inputs which must be set to a correct value. This study presents a review of research on the protection of design data. Many research works propose to protect design data and it includes functional locking, hardware obfuscation and IC/IP identification in different ways. It concludes with the need to design an efficient protection scheme based on several properties.

Keywords: Counterfeiting, Hardware Security, Intellectual Property, Integrated Circuit Cloning, Logic Obfuscation

Cite this Article: K.N. Baluprithviraj, S. Vijayachitra. Hardware Protection of Design Data for Integrated Circuits: A Review. International Journal of Distributed Computing and Technology. 2019; 5 (1): 9–14p.