Layout-Aware Switching Activity Localization to Enhance Hardware Trojan Detection

Government agencies and the semiconductor industry have raised serious concerns about malicious modifications to the integrated circuits. The added functionality known as hardware Trojan poses major detection and isolation challenges. This paper presents a new hardware trust architecture to magnify functional Trojans activity. Trojan detection resolution depends on Trojan activity directly and circuit activity reversely. The proposed architecture reorders scan cells based on their placement during physical design to reduce circuit switching activity by limiting it into a specific region. This helps magnify Trojan contribution to the total circuit transient power by increasing Trojan-to-circuit switching activity (TCA) and Trojan-to-circuit power consumption (TCP). The proposed technique aims to improve the efficiency of power-based side-channel signal analysis techniques for detecting hardware Trojans. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the method in significantly increasing TCA and TCP.