Science Daily March 20, 2023
To ensure the absence of Trojans in commissioned chips, one straightforward solution is to compare the received semiconductor devices to the design files that were initially submitted to the foundry. The fundamental techniques to detect Trojans which require evident changes to the silicon layout are well-understood. According to an international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium) there is a glaring lack of public case studies describing the process in its entirety while making the underlying datasets publicly available. To improve upon this state of the art they presented a public and open hardware Trojan detection case study based on four different digital ICs using a Red Team vs. Blue Team approach. The Red Team created small changes acting as surrogates for inserted Trojans in the layouts of 90 nm, 65 nm, 40 nm, and 28 nm ICs. The Blue Team detected all differences between digital layout and manufactured device by means of a GDSII-vs-SEM-image comparison. According to the researchers their work answers common questions about the efficiency of such techniques for relevant IC sizes and conclusions can be drawn about the impact of technology scaling on the detection performance… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE