Scanning Acoustic Microscopy Package Fingerprint Extraction for Integrate Circuit Hardware Assurance

The supply chain of the semiconductor industry is experiencing painful growth and advancement in chip development with the help of recently passed U.S legislation and funding to address a chip shortage. However, it is not without some drawbacks, one of which is the challenge of maintaining control over the manufacturing quality throughout the entire process. As a result of this, physical inspection for hardware security is a necessity to assure the semiconductor devices. In this paper, various physical inspection methods are reviewed and scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) is proved to be the ideal physical inspection method to minimize the possibility of counterfeits which might be the feasible solution in detecting counterfeits on a large scale.