Rethinking Split Manufacturing: An Information-Theoretic Approach with Secure Layout Techniques

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Abhrajit Sengupta, Satwik Patnaik, Johann Knechtel, Mohammed Ashraf, Siddharth Garg and Ozgur Sinanoglu

Split manufacturing is a promising technique to defend against fab-based malicious activities such as IP piracy, overbuilding, and insertion of hardware Trojans. However, a network flow-based proximity attack, proposed by Wang et al. (DAC’16) [1], has demonstrated that most prior art on split manufacturing is highly vulnerable. Here in this work, we present two practical layout techniques towards secure split manufacturing: (i) gate-level graph coloring and (ii) clustering of same-type gates. Our approach shows promising results against the advanced proximity attack, lowering its success rate by 5.27x, 3.19x, and 1.73x on average compared to the unprotected layouts when splitting at metal layers M1, M2, and M3, respectively.