Thermo-Seal: A Multi-Layered Infrared Watermarking Scheme for on-Field IC Provenance Verification Using Thermal Signatures

In the era of rapidly advancing integrated circuit (IC) technology, where modern systems-in-packages (SiPs) integrate multiple ICs into a single package, the risk of intellectual property (IP) counterfeiting and piracy has become a critical challenge. As SiPs increasingly incorporate a diverse array of IP cores, including entire chips from various vendors, often without clear provenance, the potential for unauthorized use or misattribution of IP has escalated, posing financial and legal risks to IP providers. This issue is further exacerbated by the growing complexity of package-level integration and the widening productivity gap between IC design, packaging, and system-level assembly. Hardware watermarking aims to mitigate these risks, offering a means to embed unique identifiers directly into IP cores or chips. This enables designers and IP providers to verify ownership, track IP usage, and protect against piracy even after the IP has been integrated into a package. Ideally a watermark for proof of ownership should be: i) Easy to identify and verify for the proprietary entity ii) Difficult to identify and replicate for an adversarial entity. In this work we propose a robust, multi-layered approach for embedding a watermarking scheme called ‘Thermo-Seal’, leveraging the interplay between firmwarecontrolled and hardware-design-based signals to generate thermal signatures that are detectable via transient IR thermography.