Counterfeit IC Detection By Image Texture Analysis

The widespread penetration of counterfeit integrated circuits (ICs) is not only a major threat to the electronic goods supply chain, but also constitute a great threat to national security. Image processing based counterfeit IC design techniques are promising, but currently often suffer from high computational complexity and requirement of expensive image acquisition infrastructure. We describe two techniques based on image texture analysis to automate the process of counterfeit IC detection. The first method employs local textural feature identification to detect counterfeit ICs. The second method includes identification of counterfeit ICs by segmenting the image into regions of different textural features using texture filters. The first method is of lower computational complexity compared to the segmentation method, but the second method is capable of blind identification in the sense that it does not require knowledge of the textural features of a golden IC sample. Our experimental results show that these methods have high detection accuracy, even for images acquired using ordinary digital cameras and low-end digital microscopes.