Threshold Voltage-Defined Switches for Programmable Gates

Abstract: Semiconductor supply chain is increasingly getting exposed to variety of security attacks such as Trojan insertion, cloning, counterfeiting, reverse engineering (RE), piracy of Intellectual Property (IP) or Integrated Circuit (IC) and side-channel analysis due to involvement of untrusted parties. In this paper, we propose transistor threshold voltage-defined switches to camouflage the logic gate both logically and physically to resist against RE and IP piracy. The proposed gate can function as NAND, AND, NOR, OR, XOR, XNOR, INV and BUF robustly using threshold-defined switches. The camouflaged design operates at nominal voltage and obeys conventional reliability limits. The proposed gate can also be used to personalize the design during manufacturing.