Design of Accurate Low-Cost On-Chip Structures for Protecting Integrated Circuits Against Recycling

The recycling of electronic components has become a major industrial and governmental concern, as it could potentially impact the security and reliability of a wide variety of electronic systems. It is extremely challenging to detect a recycled integrated circuit (IC) that is already used for a very short period of time because the process variations outpace the degradation caused by aging, especially in lower technology nodes. In this paper, we propose a suite of solutions, based on lightweight negative bias temperature instability (NBTI)-aware ring oscillators (ROs), for combating die and IC recycling (CDIR) when ICs are used for a very short duration. The proposed solutions are implemented in the 90-nm technology node. The simulation results demonstrate that our newly proposed NBTI-aware multiple pair RO-based CDIRs can detect ICs used only for a few hours.