Analog and Mixed-Signal IC Security Via Sizing Camouflaging

We treat the problem of analog Integrated Circuit (IC) obfuscation towards Intellectual Property (IP) protection against reverse engineering. Obfuscation is achieved by camouflaging the effective geometry of layout components via the use of fake contacts, which originally were proposed for gate camo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems
Main Authors Leonhard, Julian, Sayed, Alhassan, Louërat, Marie-Minerve, Aboushady, Hassan, Stratigopoulos, Haralampos-G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2020
Subjects
Computer Aided Engineering
Computer Science
Electronics
Embedded Systems
Engineering Sciences
Micro and nanotechnologies
Microelectronics
Modeling and Simulation
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Summary:We treat the problem of analog Integrated Circuit (IC) obfuscation towards Intellectual Property (IP) protection against reverse engineering. Obfuscation is achieved by camouflaging the effective geometry of layout components via the use of fake contacts, which originally were proposed for gate camouflaging in digital ICs. We present a library of obfuscated layout components, we give recommendations for effective camouflaging, we discuss foreseen attacks and the achieved resiliency, and we propose security metrics for assessing the hardness of reverse engineering. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on an operational amplifier and an RF Σ∆ Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). Index Terms-Hardware security and trust, analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, IP/IC piracy, reverse engineering, design obfuscation, camouflaging.
ISSN:0278-0070