REFICS: A Step Towards Linking Vision with Hardware Assurance

Hardware assurance is a key process in ensuring the integrity, security and functionality of a hardware device. Its heavy reliance on images, especially on Scanning Electron Microscopy images, makes it an excellent candidate for the vision community. The goal of this paper is to provide a pathway for inter-community collaboration by introducing the existing challenges for hardware assurance on integrated circuits in the context of computer vision and support further development using a large-scale dataset with 800,000 images. A detailed benchmark of existing vision approaches in hardware assurance on the dataset is also included for quantitative insights into the problem.