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On-Chip and Continuous Monitoring of EM Signals for Secure Microelectronics

Project ID:

P18_23

Co-Principal Investigator(s):

Dr. J. M. Emmert

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Rashmi Jha

Topic Areas:

Quantifying Real Threats, Likelihood, Mitigations, and Residual Risks, Use of “Untrusted” Components in Secure Systems, New Approaches to Secure On-Shore Microelectronics Design and Manufacturing, On-Chip Monitoring of ASIC Integrity from Design Through Fabrication and Fielding

Abstract

IC designs are getting complex requiring billions of transistors on a chip. Manufacturing of IC and semiconductors is getting even more complex with availability of new transistor technologies at advanced nodes and 2.5D, 3D, and monolithic integration and heterogenous packaging options to meet the system requirements. Under these scenarios, detecting hardware trojans during design and manufacturing stages is a complex problem as most detection techniques work under a basic assumption of a “threat-model” that can have limitations. For heterogeneously integrated systems, detection of trojans is more complex as integrated test vectors are needed. Insertion of hardware trojan is not a random event (like Process Voltage Temperature variabilities) but rather it is driven by an attacker’s intent. Therefore, defense electronics need more stringent protection schemes over non-defense electronics due to possible scale of damage (i.e. Zero Trust Model). This imposes an interesting problem to address: how defense electronics can be selectively made more secured while using the same manufacturing and design tools used by non-defense electronics? We propose to solve this problem by developing low-cost integrity monitoring approaches and integrating it on pre-fabricated CMOS dies or heterogeneously packaged systems. Our proposed monitoring approach is based on integrating antenna arrays with high spatial coverage on CMOS dies and sensing the electromagnetic (EM) emissions from IC in real-time over its entire lifetime. The sensitivity of this approach can be increased by making use of machine learning (ML) based approach for data analysis that can detect changes in EM signals from expected behavior. Using this approach we can detect any integrity issues leading to changes in EM signals. Our current emphasis is to make use of this approach for predicting normal vs. accelerated aging of ICs due to process tampering. We believe this approach is scalable and can be integrated to monitors entire system or each component even in complex heterogenous packages.

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