End-to-End Traceability of ICs in Component Supply Chain for Fighting Against Recycling

The rise of recycled integrated circuits (ICs) in the critical infrastructures causes a major concern to the government and industry because these chips exhibit lower performance and have shorter remaining useful life. The detection of these ICs becomes extremely challenging when they are in the supply chain. It is necessary to power up a chip at a distributor's site to measure different electrical parameters for verifying whether it is used before. However, this can be challenging, as many of the distributors may not be equipped with proper test infrastructures. Moreover, the reliability of authentic chips may be reduced if they have been removed from the packaging boxes for testing purposes. In this paper, we propose a robust and low-cost solution for enabling the traceability of an IC. The proposed solution builds a chain of trust among the manufacturer, distributors, and system integrator by enabling end-to-end traceability from manufacturing to system integration and provides protection against IC recycling. The proposed solution utilizes a small passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, which needs to be placed on the package. Any entity in the supply chain can verify the authenticity of a chip using a commercial RFID reader.