Design of On-Chip Lightweight Sensors for Effective Detection of Recycled ICs

The counterfeiting and recycling of integrated circuits (ICs) have become major issues in recent years, potentially impacting the security and reliability of electronic systems bound for military, financial, or other critical applications. With identical functionality and packaging, it would be extremely difficult to distinguish recycled ICs from unused ICs. In this paper, two types of on-chip lightweight sensors are proposed to identify recycled ICs by measuring circuit usage time when used in the field. Recycled ICs detection based on aging in ring oscillators (ROs-based) and antifuse (AF-based) are the two techniques presented in this paper. For RO-based sensors, statistical data analysis is used to separate process and temperature variations´ effects on the sensor from aging experienced by the sensor in the ICs. For AF-based sensor, counters and embedded one-time programmable memory are used to record the usage time of ICs by counting the cycle of system clock or switching activities of a certain number of nets in the design. Simulation results using 90-nm technology and silicon results from 90-nm test chips show the effectiveness of RO-based sensors for identification of recycled ICs. In addition, the analysis of usage time stored in AF-based sensors shows that recycled ICs, even used for a very short period, can be accurately identified.