Recycled Counterfeit Chips Detection for AMS and Digital ICs Using Low-Area, Self-Contained, and Secure LDO Odometers

Counterfeit electronics have widespread impacts on the many aspects of modern civilization that depend on integrated circuits (ICs) or chips. Among all of the counterfeit chips types, recycled and remarked are the most prevalent. These are the chips that are taken from discarded, obsolete electronics board and then sold as new. As a result, they are aged and deteriorated with short remaining lifespan and prone to failure. Silicon odometers have been proposed to detect recycled digital ICs, but few are applicable to analog and mixed signal (AMS) chips. Recently, an odometer that can be integrated into a common AMS IP block, the low dropout regulator (LDO), was proposed. However, it has high area overhead, requires external measurements for classification, and has a security vulnerability. In this article, self-contained LDO odometers are proposed that overcome these issues while still being able to detect aging in AMS and digital chips. A calibration feature is also introduced to compensate for process variation. The area overhead of the analog and digital versions are \(8 \mu m^2\) $8\mu m^2$ and \(3.3 \mu m^2\) $3.3\mu m^2$ , respectively, which are an order of magnitude smaller than the prior state-of-the-art. A detection accuracy of \(98.2 \%\) $98.2\%$ and \(99.5 \%\) $99.5\%$ have been achieved for each which are comparable to existing odometers.