Guided Electromagnetic Wave Technique for IC Authentication

Abstract

Counterfeiting of an Integrated Circuit (IC) has become a significant concern for electronics manufacturers, system integrators, and end users. It is necessary to find a robust implementation that is efficient, low cost, and noninvasive in detection and avoidance of ICs counterfeiting. In this paper, we introduce the concept of using a guided radiofrequency (RF) wave technique to authenticate ICs. The approach discussed in this work highlights the use of electromagnetic (EM)/radiofrequency (RF) response that has been further evaluated to assign fingerprint or signature of ICs for the purpose of authentication. Our approach is to use EM/RF guided wave to sense the response of the ICs, extract the manufacturing-based process variation of an IC and finally generate identifier or signature of that IC. As a proof-of-concept, we performed experiments over different field-programmable gate array (FPGA) boards of the same family. The post-processing technique was applied on the measurement results to statistically quantify the error probability of the authentication technique.

Keywords

• counterfeit IC
• EM
• FPGA
• process variation