Chip-level anti-reverse engineering using transformable interconnects

Cloning of integrated circuit (IC) chips have emerged as a significant threat to the semiconductor industry. Unauthorized extraction of design information from IC chips can be carried out in numerous ways. Invasive methods physically disassemble chip package and gain access to the different layers of a die through the low-cost delaying processing. This paper presents a new countermeasure exploiting transformable IC technologies. Transformable ICs are fabricated using materials that not only are electronically active but also change their electrical properties and physical compositions when experiencing invasive attacks. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed approach in improving the complexity of chip reverse engineering without introducing large performance overhead.