S.P. Khatri
Texas A&M University, Texas, United States
Keywords: floating gate, secure, digital design, reverse engineering
Flash technology, traditionally used for non-volatile memory, shows significant potential for use in general-purpose digital and analog circuit design. This paper explores flash-based secure digital IC designs, which achieve quantifiably high security against reverse engineering attacks while achieving identical power, delay and area as conventional standard-cell based CMOS design approaches. Further, such a flash-based design offers resilience against IC aging, since the flash transistors in the design can be reprogrammed when the IC ages, thereby canceling the performance degradation due to aging. In addition, the resulting design possesses a (reversible) “kill-switch” functionality – in the event that custody of the IC is lost, the operator has the ability to revert the IC to an erased state, which makes it inoperable by the adversary. When custody of the IC is regained, the IC can be reprogrammed and made fully operational again. Finally, the same IC can be programmed in different ways, yielding variants of the IC with either reduced functionality, or reduced performance, or both. This allows the variants with the best functionality and performance to be reserved by the operator for their own use, and less capable variants for non-maximally trusted partners.