Physical and Functional Reverse Engineering Challenges for Advanced Semiconductor Solutions

Hardware Trojan Insertion in Finalized Layouts: From Methodology to a Silicon Demonstration

“…An IC internal structure can be reconstructed utilizing advanced physical reverse engineering techniques [31]- [33]. Physical reverse engineering is often an invasive method divided into three steps; (1) sample preparation; (2) delayering and imaging; (3) image post-processing.…”

“…Finally, the images are stitched and vectorized to retrieve the layout representation of the chip [32]. Note this process is yet to be fully automated, resulting in a highly time-intensive task prone to errors [31]. On the other hand, promising methods are utilizing x-ray diffraction or a confocal microscope to recover the inner structure of the IC without the need for delayering [33], i.e., without destroying the inspected sample.…”