Future of Engineering

Pirated microchips account for billions of dollars in annual losses to chipmakers. But a series of novel techniques developed at Rice University over the past year could stop pirates by allowing chip designers to lock and remotely activate chips with a unique ID tag

When a chip is locked with the new technology, only the patent-holder can decipher the key and activate the chip -- meaning knockoffs and stolen chips are worthless.

This month, Koushanfar and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Igor Markov and Jarrod Roy, unveiled a new form of the technology called “EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits" at the IEEE Design Automation and Test Conference in Europe.

Hardware makers have tried a number of approaches to safeguard designers' IP. But safeguarding individual ICs – and not IPs – is the unique aspect and contribution of Koushanfar’s work.

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Keywords: Microchip Fingerprints, Out Chip Pirates, Koushanfar, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), watermarks, DSP, EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits

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Labels: Computer-Science