A novel area efficient on-chip RO-Sensor for recycled IC detection

Abstract

Out of different types of counterfeit integrated circuits (ICs) present in the supply chain, recycled ICs are major threat to security and reliability of electronic components. Recycled ICs possess shorter lifetime and it is extremely difficult to distinguish a recycled IC in a group of fresh IC with similar functionality. Out of several recycled IC detection methodology, Ring Oscillator (RO) sensor based detection approach is most efficient, because of its simple design and can detect ICs used only for few days. In this paper, we proposed two different types of modified RO sensor with lower area overhead. First RO sensor accelerates the aging to improve the detection of recycled ICs which are used for few days. The second architecture uses current controlled configurable RO (C-CRO) to further improve the detection of recycled IC. The RO in both the proposed sensor is designed by using modified pseudo NMOS logic based inverter. The proposed inverter accelerates the aging caused by negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) and lower the impact of process variation (PV) to improve the rate of detection. Both the proposed RO sensors are simulated in 90 nm CMOS technology. The simulation result shows both the proposed sensor improves the rate of detection as compared to the conventional sensor.