ASSURE: RTL Locking Against an Untrusted Foundry

Semiconductor design companies are integrating proprietary intellectual property (IP) blocks to build custom integrated circuits (IC) and fabricate them in a third-party foundry. Unauthorized IC copies cost these billions of dollars annually. While several methods have been proposed for hardware IP obfuscation, they operate on the gate-level netlist, i.e., after synthesis tools embed semantic information into netlist. We propose ASSURE protect modules operating register-transfer level (RTL) description. The RTL approach has three advantages: (i) it allows designers obfuscate cores generated with many different (e.g., generators, high-level tools, pre-existing IPs). (ii) obfuscates semantics an before logic synthesis; (iii) does not require modifications EDA flows. perform security assessment ASSURE.