On-chip Structures and Techniques to Improve the Security, Trustworthiness and Reliability of Integrated Circuits

Due to the globalization of the semiconductor design and fabrication process, inte- grated circuits (ICs) are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious activities. There are two major problems that impact the security, trustworthiness, and relia- bility of ICs used in military, financial, or other critical applications: (i) Malicious inclusions and alterations, known as hardware Trojans, could be easily inserted into intellectual properties (IPs) or ICs by an untrusted process. These hardware Trojans may leak confidential information to an adversary or potentially disable part or all of an IC at a specific target time in the field. Techniques need to be developed to identify these hardware Trojans to prevent the potential damages. (ii) The number of circuit-related counterfeiting incidents reported by component manufacturers increases significantly over the past few years and recycled ICs contribute major percentages of the total reported counterfeiting incidents. These recycled ICs enter the market when electronic “recyclers” divert scrapped circuit boards away from their designated place of disposal for the purposes of removing and reselling the ICs on those boards. Since these recycled ICs have been used in the field before, the performance of such ICs has been degraded by aging effects and harsh recycling process. In this thesis, to address the above two problems, we developed several light-weight on-chip structures and techniques to improve the security and reliability of ICs. These structures and techniques include (i) a verification-based flow to detect hardware Trojans in IPs, (ii) an on-chip ring oscillator network (RON) acting as power monitors to detect hardware Trojans in ICs, (iii) a novel technique combining the improved RON with transient current to improve the sensitivity of the RON for hardware Trojan detection, (iv) three light-weight sensors recording the usage time to identify recycled ICs, (v) a path- delay fingerprinting flow with zero area overhead to identify recycled ICs, and (vi) two true random number generators (TRNGs) to generate sequences with high randomness, which are widely used for secure data communication and storage. The simulation results and implementation analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques