A zero-cost approach to detect recycled SoC chips using embedded SRAM

Considering the rapid growth of the global consumer electronics market, counterfeiting of integrated circuits (ICs), and in particular recycling, has become a serious issue in recent years. Recycled ICs are those harvested from old systems and re-inserted into the supply chain as new. Such ICs exhibit lower performance and shorter life time, and as a result, pose serious threats to the security and reliability of electronic systems used for critical applications. In this paper, we propose the first recycled IC detection technique based on aging of embedded SRAMs. In our approach, an enrollment phase is used to identify the SRAM cells that initially provide a stable output upon startup (like a PUF ID), but are highly unstable with aging. During verification, if the IC is recycled, the aging in SRAM cells due to usage in the field causes its ID to change, allowing it to be detected. We also develop a framework to determine the parameters (length of ID, thresholds, etc.) to achieve high confidence. Results from new and aged SRAM of Xillinx Spartan-3 FPGA development boards show that the detection accuracy is high with proper parameter selected (false accept rate and false reject rate are 0 and 0.03 respectively) and robust against supply voltage variations.