Securing Programmable Analog ICs Against Piracy

Mohamed Elshamy, Alhassan Sayed, Marie-Minerve Louerat, Amine Rhouni, Hassan Aboushady, Haralampos-G. Stratigopoulos
2020 2020 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)  
In this paper, we demonstrate a security approach for the class of highly-programmable analog Integrated Circuits (ICs) that can be used as a countermeasure for unauthorized chip use and piracy. The approach relies on functionality locking, i.e. a lock mechanism is introduced into the design such that unless the correct key is provided the functionality breaks. We show that for highly-programmable analog ICs the programmable fabric can naturally be used as the lock mechanism. We demonstrate the
more » ... approach on a multi-standard RF receiver with configuration settings of 64-bit words.
doi:10.23919/date48585.2020.9116520 dblp:conf/date/ElshamySLRAS20 fatcat:qzzrfvxxyfgvhhzv43jygxdguy