A small tamper-resistant anti-recycling IC sensor with a reused I/O interface and DC signalling

Abstract

Counterfeit electronic components are known to enter supply chains through recycling, with these already-aged components creating serious reliability risks, particularly for critical infrastructure systems. A number of recycled integrated circuit (IC) risk mitigation approaches have been proposed, but these generally lack pragmatic feasibility. This work proposes a novel real-world deployable on-board sensor that: 1) is tamper-resistant by exploiting near-permanent changes caused by hot carrier injection (HCI); 2) generates a DC signal measurable by common low-cost test equipment; and 3) reuses an existing I/O interface, including existing pins; while 4) requiring a very small footprint. Combining this sensor with a random sample-based testing strategy allows for low-cost and time efficient detection of fraudulently recycled batches of ICs. Through simulation-based validation using process-accurate models of a 65 nm technology we show that employing a random sample size as small as 60 is sufficient for identifying such batches with a statistical significance level of 0.01.