2016/05/30 by Ronen Adato, Adato, Ronen, Aydan Uyar +12
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Engineering · #FOS: Physical sciences #Industrial Vision Systems and Defect Detection #Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis #Optics (physics.optics) #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security #Spectroscopy Techniques in Biomedical and Chemical Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.09306
openalex publication_date 2016/05/30 · openalex created_date 2022/09/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Modern semiconductor integrated circuits are increasingly fabricated at\nuntrusted third party foundries. There now exist myriad security threats of\nmalicious tampering at the hardware level and hence a clear and pressing need\nfor new tools that enable rapid, robust and low-cost validation of circuit\nlayouts. Optical backside imaging offers an attractive platform, but its\nlimited resolution and throughput cannot cope with the nanoscale sizes of\nmodern circuitry and the need to image over a large area. We propose and\ndemonstrate a multi-spectral imaging approach to overcome these obstacles by\nidentifying key circuit elements on the basis of their spectral response. This\nobviates the need to directly image the nanoscale components that define them,\nthereby relaxing resolution and spatial sampling requirements by 1 and 2 - 4\norders of magnitude respectively. Our results directly address critical\nsecurity needs in the integrated circuit supply chain and highlight the\npotential of spectroscopic techniques to address fundamental resolution\nobstacles caused by the need to image ever shrinking feature sizes in\nsemiconductor integrated circuits.\n