Detection and Avoidance of Counterfeit ICs

The rise of "counterfeit" integrated circuits (ICs) being sold as "authentic" through the global semiconductor supply chain is a severe threat due to their inferior quality, shorter remaining life, potentially poorer performance, and many security vulnerabilities compared to their authentic counterparts. Recycled, remarked, overproduced, defective/out-of-specification, cloned, or tampered ICs pose a severe threat to our critical infrastructures, and call for immediate solutions.

IP Piracy and IC Overproduction

The persistent trend of device scaling has enabled designers to fit more and more functionality on a system-on-chip (SoC) to reduce overall area and cost of integrated circuits (ICs). As the complexity has grown exponentially, it is impossible to design a complete SoC by a design house alone. Therefore, the semiconductor industry has shifted gears to the concept of design reuse rather than developing the whole SoC from scratch. In parallel, the increased complexity of the fabrication process has resulted in a majority of SoC designers no longer maintaining a fabrication unit of fab of their own. The SoC designers, first, get licenses for third-party IPs (3PIPs) for their designs, build the SoCs by integrating the various 3PIPs, and then outsource the SoC design to offshore fabs for production. IP piracy and IC overproduction become significant concerns to the government and industry and require innovative solutions to prevent these threats.

Blockchain for Security

The complexity of the electronics supply chain has grown significantly due to the expansion of globalization in the 21st century. Electronic parts are now manufactured, distributed, and sold globally. Ensuring the security and integrity of the supply chain has become extremely challenging due to the widespread infiltration of untrusted hardware, specifically, counterfeit and cloned parts. The provenance of microelectronics and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts become prohibitively challenging and call for immediate solutions. Blockchain technology can be a way of ensuring the traceability of electronic components in the supply chain. A blockchain-based framework can be used to track and trace every chip while they are circulating in the supply chain.

Design, Test, and Security of Skyrmion Logic Circuits

With rapid scaling, CMOS devices are approaching the limit of quantum-mechanical boundaries. Among other things, this has resulted in increased process variation and static power dissipation. Fortunately, spintronic devices offer a feasible choice for post-Moore devices, given the recent advances in their design and fabrication process. As a realizable and robust topological magnetic texture in real space, magnetic skyrmion offers an ideal platform for implementing various non-volatile logic designs and magnetic memories. For the past few years, technologists have been predicting the end of scaling. Of course, these predictions are a direct consequence of what has happened to the CMOS technology. The chip technology has advanced in three directions to combat the difficulties arising from scaling. First, improved fabrication methods have recently brought the feature size down to 2 nanometers. Second, new geometries, such as 3-D device structures of nanosheet or finFET and others, have evolved. Third, a shift from semiconductors to other materials and physical phenomena, such as magnetic skyrmion to construct switching devices has shown new possibilities.

Attacks and Solutions in Cryptography

The advancement in high-performance computing and the dawn of quantum computing drive the need for novel designs of cryptographic algorithms that are secure against potential future adversaries. The emergence of the Internet of things (IoT) also propels the designing of lightweight cryptography suitable for resource-constrained edge devices. It is of paramount importance to analyze the security and potential weakness of different crypto-primitives under various applications to ensure confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and nonrepudiation for secure communications. In addition, Shor's factoring algorithm exposes the possible vulnerabilities of well-established public key infrastructure (PKI) such as RSA when facing quantum computers. The lattice-based learning with errors (LWE) is one of the promising candidates for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), thwarting the cryptanalysis efforts with advanced quantum machines.

Trusted Electronic Systems

It is becoming challenging to ensure the security, integrity, and authenticity of electronic systems, as they have been manufactured in environments of limited trust, lack relevant government or other appropriate oversight, and then travel across the globe through intermediaries in the supply chain before being deployed. Ensuring the security of such systems is of great concern as an adversary can create a backdoor or insert malware to bypass the existing security modules. The reliability of such systems could also be questionable as the parts used in these systems may be counterfeit and of inferior quality. It is of prime importance to develop solutions that can prevent an adversary from creating these counterfeit and cloned systems.