A survey and perspective on electronic design automation tools for ensuring SoC security

With the increasing scales and complexity of SoC integration, electronic design automation (EDA) tools have been becoming indispensable for simulating and verifying the chip before highly expensive tape-out. From design, test to manufacture, EDA is highly evolved almost every step during the entire SoC chip design process, making it a crucial part for ensuring the SoC supply chain security under the intensified tension of global semiconductor supply chain. In this paper, commercial and open-source EDA tools in SoC design process will be introduced. The impact of EDA tools on ensuring SoC supply chain security will be also expounded and analyzed.

I. Introduction

With the advent of the post-Moore era, system-on-chip (SoC) with higher functional integration and better performance has gradually become the mainstream of current chips, which has been widely used in consumer electronics, information technology (IT), communications and autonomous driving [1]. Under the intensified tension of global semiconductor supply chain, ensuring the security of the SoC supply chain has become increasingly important. EDA tools, known as the “mother of chips”, is an indispensable part of SoC design process, thus has a potentially serious impact on the security of the SoC supply chain.