Physical and Functional Reverse Engineering Challenges for Advanced Semiconductor Solutions

Abstract

The Achievement Award is given to individuals who made outstanding contributions to state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems in their life. To be eligible, candidates must have made innovative contributions that impacted how electronic systems are being designed.

Hardware Trojan Insertion in Finalized Layouts: From Methodology to a Silicon Demonstration

“…An IC internal structure can be reconstructed utilizing advanced physical reverse engineering techniques [31]- [33]. Physical reverse engineering is often an invasive method divided into three steps; (1) sample preparation; (2) delayering and imaging; (3) image post-processing.…”

“…Finally, the images are stitched and vectorized to retrieve the layout representation of the chip [32]. Note this process is yet to be fully automated, resulting in a highly time-intensive task prone to errors [31]. On the other hand, promising methods are utilizing x-ray diffraction or a confocal microscope to recover the inner structure of the IC without the need for delayering [33], i.e., without destroying the inspected sample.…”