Beyond the Interconnections: Split Manufacturing in RF Designs

Abstract

With the globalization of the integrated circuit (IC) design flow of chip fabrication, intellectual property (IP) piracy is becoming the main security threat. While most of the protection methods are dedicated for digital circuits, we are trying to protect radio-frequency (RF) designs. For the first time, we applied the split manufacturing method in RF circuit protection. Three different implementation cases are introduced for security and design overhead tradeoffs, i.e., the removal of the top metal layer, the removal of the top two metal layers and the design obfuscation dedicated to RF circuits. We also developed a quantitative security evaluation method to measure the protection level of RF designs under split manufacturing. Finally, a simple Class AB power amplifier and a more sophisticated Class E power amplifier are used for the demonstration through which we prove that: (1) the removal of top metal layer or the top two metal layers can provide high-level protection for RF circuits with a lower request to domestic foundries; (2) the design obfuscation method provides the highest level of circuit protection, though at the cost of design overhead; and (3) split manufacturing may be more suitable for RF designs than for digital circuits, and it can effectively reduce IP piracy in untrusted off-shore foundries.

Concerted wire lifting: Enabling secure and cost-effective split manufacturing

“…5, where we plot PPA over- heads for naive lifting of randomly selected nets. 4 Note that the die area is particularly impacted. That is because lifting more and more wires in an uncontrolled manner induces notable routing congestion which, in order to obtain DRC-clean layouts, can only be managed by enlarging the die outlines.…”

“…Hill et al [2] successfully demonstrated the viability of SM by fabricating a 1.3 milliontransistor asynchronous FPGA. Further studies also bear testament to the applicability of SM [3,4,5]. However, the overall acceptance of SM remains behind expectations so far, mainly due to concerns about cost.…”

A Brief Program Robustness Survey

“…It is also a key issue in hardware sensors and chips and in hardware trust [14]. Robustness is essential for embedded systems security where hardware attacks such as fault injection attacks and hardware Trojans can be prevented if robustness were taken as a main factor in embedded systems design [15,16].…”

A 0.7 V, Ultra-Wideband Common Gate LNA with Feedback Body Bias Topology for Wireless Applications

“…It gives reasons for low-power very-large scale integration (VLSI) design industries and researchers to develop low-power, low-noise, and reliable UWB radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for these applications. Moreover, continuous shrinking in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip fabrication technologies and split manufacturing techniques in RF designs [6,7], makes it possible to design and fabricate RFICs on the nanometer scale [8,9].…”