949-824-9127

Addressing Supply Chain Security with Split Manufacturing

Speaker Dr. Ted Huffmire Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California
CECS Host Professor Nikil Dutt
Location DBH 3011
Date & Time July 27, 2012 Seminar begins at 11:00am, Refreshment at 10:45am
Abstract Security is an essential design goal in computer architecture, and security is a concern throughout the entire lifecycle of a system. The process of designing hardware requires trusting intellectual property (IP) cores and computer-aided design (CAD) tools developed by third parties, as well as the fabrication, packaging, assembly, and delivery of the final system. Valuable IP is vulnerable to theft and modification during tape-out, even if a perfect design free of security flaws is sent to the foundry. Of course, no design is ever perfect, and having a trusted foundry does not solve the problem of flawed designs. Furthermore, the trusted foundry may not have the capability to deliver the most aggressive technology node, volume, yield, or cost. Even the extraordinary step of building everything from scratch in-house, including all of the tool chains, both digital and analog, is not guaranteed to result in a trustworthy design. This short, informal, seminar-style talk will explore three split manufacturing approaches for addressing hardware supply chain security: reconfigurable hardware, 2D IC split manufacturing, and 3D IC split manufacturing. Reconfigurable hardware allows the design to be loaded onto a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device in a secure facility after fabrication. With 2D IC split manufacturing, different metal layers of the same wafer are fabricated in different foundries, one of which is a trusted foundry. With 3D IC split manufacturing, two or more individual die are fabricated in different foundries, one of which is a trusted foundry, and then assembled in a trusted facility. The challenges and opportunities of each of these approaches will be compared and contrasted, as well as the viability of split manufacturing in general.
Biography

Ted Huffmire

Ted Huffmire is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research spans both computer security and computer architecture, focusing on hardware-oriented security and the development of policy enforcement mechanisms for application-specific devices. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM. The views presented in this talk are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Defense