Towards a Comprehensive System for Physical Hardware Inspection for Trust

The US National Cybersecurity Strategy asks for “securing the semiconductor supply chain” [1], and the EU Chips Act addresses the “tech sovereignty” [2]. Both programs emphasize the importance of a trusted supply chain, which starts with trusted microelectronics. Counterfeiting, malicious tampering, and intellectual property (IP) piracy compromise its safety, security, reliability, and performance. To mitigate the risk and establish a high level of trust, all steps and tools in the development and manufacturing must be secured, and post-production, a functional and physical verification should be able to rate the authenticity and integrity. Physical inspection and comparison with a golden sample are most effective in identifying major supply chain threats. We define four comparators for the package: the process, the design kit, the technology, the polygons or structures, and the requirements for an adequate inspection flow. The relevance and severity of the supply chain threats define the appropriate analysis methods and the weighting of their results. Exemplary steps and results of counterfeit detection demonstrate the systematic approach.