Making a Case for Logic Locking

Due to the rising expenses and intricacy involved in the development, implementation, fabrication, and testing of modern ICs, the idea of VLSI reuse has become increasingly common in high-tech company products. While legal protection measures like patents, copyrights, contracts, trademarks, and trade secrets can safeguard companies against product misappropriation, they do not offer any physical protection to ICs. Thus, they cannot directly thwart threats such as IP piracy but can only discourage the misuse of IPs to avoid legal repercussions and financial penalties. Given the intense competition among high-tech companies and the possibility of malicious intentions in the horizontal IC supply chain, hardware designs need protection methods to safeguard against unauthorized and illegitimate access to detailed IP information. In response to these demands, several hardware design-for-trust (DfTr) techniques such as IC metering, watermarking, IC camouflaging, split manufacturing, and logic locking have been introduced. The primary objective of these techniques is to ensure that an IC is uncorrupted, trustworthy, and protected from design and data perspectives against threats such as unlawful reverse engineering and piracy. This chapter reviews these DfTr techniques in VLSI design and showcases how the versatility of logic locking could excel in IC supply chain to provide a dependable solution against a possible attacker at any point in the IC supply chain.