Fab forensics: Increasing trust in IC fabrication

Abstract

Fabrication and design are now performed by different companies as semiconductor fabrication facilities (fabs or foundries) seek to reduce costs by serving multiple clients and consolidating resources. However, lack of immediate control and observation reduces the trust which IC designers have in some fabs. To help fabs increase trust in their processes, we propose an approach for logging forensic information of the fab process and printing the information on chips so that examination of the chip reveals provable deviations from the design. Fab owners can benefit by catching rogue employees and by demonstrating high security standards to their customers. Our proposed solution uses a light runtime system that interacts with a trusted platform module (TPM).