Heterogeneous Integration Supply Chain Integrity Through Blockchain and CHSM

Abstract

Over the past few decades, electronics have become commonplace in government, commercial, and social domains. These devices have developed rapidly, as seen in the prevalent use of System on Chips (SoCs) rather than separate integrated circuits on a single circuit board. As the semiconductor community begins conversations over the end of Moore’s Law, an approach to further increase both functionality per area and yield using segregated functionality dies on a common interposer die, labeled a System in Package (SiP), is gaining attention. Thus, the chiplet and SiP space has grown to meet this demand, creating a new packaging paradigm, Advanced Packaging, and a new supply chain. This new distributed supply chain with multiple chiplet developers and foundries has augmented counterfeit vulnerabilities. Chiplets are currently available on an open market, and their origin and authenticity consequently are difficult to ascertain. With this lack of control over the stages of the supply chain, counterfeit threats manifest at the chiplet, interposer, and SiP levels. In this paper, we identify counterfeit threats in the SiP domain, and we propose a mitigating framework utilizing blockchain for the effective traceability of SiPs to establish provenance. Our framework utilizes the Chiplet Hardware Security Module (CHSM) to authenticate a SiP throughout its life. To accomplish this, we leverage SiP information including Electronic Chip IDs (ECIDs) of chiplets, Combating Die and IC Recycling (CDIR) sensor information, documentation, test patterns and/or electrical measurements, grade, and part number of the SiP. We detail the structure of the blockchain and establish protocols for both enrolling trusted information into the blockchain network and authenticating the SiP. Our framework mitigates SiP counterfeit threats including recycled, remarked, cloned, overproduced interposer, forged documentation, and substituted chiplet while detecting of out-of-spec and defective SiPs.

Advancing Trustworthiness in System-in-Package: A Novel Root-of-Trust Hardware Security Module for Heterogeneous Integration

“…A prototype blockchain was implemented utilizing Hyperledger Fabric [130], a platform for producing consortium and private blockchains. The prototype is a catered implementation of Calzada et al's framework for blockchain to provide integrity to the SiP supply chain [131]. For prototyping our threat model, we assume the SiP assembly is trusted, while the SiP distributor and end-user are untrusted entities (see Figure 2).…”