GRACER: Graph-Based Standard Cell Recognition in IC Images for Hardware Assurance

Global distribution of the Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chain amplifies the importance of Hardware Assurance (HA), i.e., to ensure the integrity of manufactured IC. Standard cell recognition is a crucial step in HA, which is to identify the functionality of a standard cell based on its Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images. Conventionally, this is mostly done by human inspection, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. Current works on automating this process only work on the image domain and have sub-optimal performance due to the challenges incurred by the variation in the appearance of standard cells in the images. In this paper, we propose an automatic process for standard cell recognition, through conversion to a standardized graph representation and comparing the graph structure to identify the type of the standard cell. Our proposed method represents each unique circuit structure in a unique graph representation and thus enables a one-to-one matching to a known set of templates for functionality identification. Our experiments show that our proposed method can always recognize the standard cells correctly, even under the most challenaing scenario.