University of Florida Research Foundation Inc

Bicky Shakya

Mark M Tehranipoor

Domenic J Forte

Navid Asadizanjani

Haoting Shen

Integrated circuit (IC) camouflaging has emerged as a promising solution for protecting semiconductor intellectual property (IP) against reverse engineering. The cell camouflaging covert gate leverages doping and dummy contacts to create camouflaged cells that are indistinguishable from regular standard cells under modern imaging techniques. A comprehensive security analysis of the covert gate shows that it achieves high resiliency against SAT and test-based attacks at very low overheads. Models are derived to characterize the covert cells, and metrics are developed to incorporate them into a gate-level design. Simulation results of overheads and attacks are presented on benchmark circuits.

Covert gates to protect gate-level semiconductors

Circuits and methods for protecting against intellectual property piracy and integrated circuit piracy from an untrusted third party are provided. A circuit can include an original circuit and an obfuscated circuit incorporated into the original circuit and changing the output of the original circuit, wherein the obfuscated circuit is configured to recover the output of the original circuit by modifying the obfuscated circuit. In addition, a method of manufacturing a semiconductor device can include designing a circuit including an original circuit and an obfuscated circuit, and fabricating the circuit, wherein the obfuscated circuit is configured to change an output of the original circuit and to recover the output of the original circuit by modifying the obfuscated circuit.

Growing community of inventors

San Diego, CA, United States of America

Bicky Shakya