An On-Chip Dynamically Obfuscated Wrapper for Protecting Supply Chain Against IP and IC Piracies

With the modern semiconductor supply chain, the ownership of both intellectual property (IP) and integrated circuit (IC) cannot be guaranteed. The IP piracy may take place at the untrusted IC designer or untrusted foundry without the knowledge of the original IP owner. The untrusted foundry can also perform IC piracy with reverse engineering of GDSII, overproducing the number of ICs, and shipping out-of-spec/defective devices. A holistic solution is proposed to protect the ownership of both IP owners and IC designers. In this solution, a dynamically obfuscated wrapper for split test (DOST) and a secure split test methodology together aim at preventing IP overusing at multiple abstraction levels and enabling IC designers to fully control the production, test, and authentication processes. DOST has been implemented and validated on video graphics array-liquid crystal display, floating-point and graphics unit, Leon3, and Leon3mp benchmarks. DOST enables the structural tests in the locked mode and the functional tests in the functionally unlocked mode. The results show that the proposed method is highly robust against IP and IC piracies with an insignificant area (1.381%) and power (1.276%) overhead.