Diffusion Programmable Device : The device to prevent reverse engineering

The secret information, which is embedded in integrated circuit (IC) devices such as a smart card, has the risk of theft by reverse engineering (RE). The circuit design of IC can be stolen by the RE, and the counterfeit can be illegally fabricated. Therefore, the secure IC device requires the circuit architecture protected from the RE attacks. This paper proposes the diffusion programmable device (DPD) architecture as a countermeasure against the RE. A look-up table circuit based on the DPD can generate desired logic function without changing the layout except diffusion layer. And, the logic function can be programmed by assigning the N-type or P-type dopant to a part of active region. A test chip using the DPD-LUT was prototyped with a 180nm CMOS technology. And, operations of vaious logic functions such as AND, OR, XOR and XNOR were confirmed through experiments.