Recycled Counterfeit Chips Detection for AMS and Digital ICs Using Low-Area, Self-Contained, and Secure LDO Odometers

Abstract

Counterfeit electronics have widespread im-pacts on the many aspects of modern civilization thatdepend on integrated circuits (ICs) or chips. Among allof the counterfeit chips types, recycled and remarkedare the most prevalent. These are the chips that aretaken from discarded, obsolete electronics board andthen sold as new. As a result, they are aged and de-teriorated with short remaining lifespan and prone tofailure. Silicon odometers have been proposed to detectrecycled digital ICs, but few are applicable to analogand mixed signal (AMS) chips. Recently, an odometerthat can be integrated into a common AMS IP block,the low dropout regulator (LDO), was proposed. However, it has high area overhead, requires external mea-surements for classification, and has a security vulnera-bility. In this article, self-contained LDO odometers areproposed that overcomes these issues while still beingable to detect aging in AMS and digital chips. A calibra-tion feature is also introduced to compensate for processvariation. The area overhead of the analog and digitalversions are 8μm2 and 3.3μm2, respectively, which arean order of magnitude smaller than the prior state-of-the-art. A detection accuracy of 98.2% and 99.5% havebeen achieved for each which are comparable to existing odometers.