| Many fabless design houses face unique challenge of providing security to their design. One of the major reason is the lack of trust on silicon foundry. It is possible that the foundry may fabricate more number of copies than specified in the contract and sell in the market, which is a threat of revenue loss for the design house. Hardware metering is defined as the process to ensure that the foundry cannot manufacture and sell more copies of ICs than specified in the contract[6][7]. We propose an automated mechanism to meter the ICs taking advantage of manufacturing variability. Every IC is locked and has to be unlocked to be functional. Delay is one of the parameters in which the manufacturing variability is reflected. We use delay characteristics to generate lockcode and keys to unlock the IC. We have shown the strength of proposed method by calculating the probability that the adversary can break the method. |
