PowerID: Using Supply-Side Impedances of Power Delivery Networks as Signatures for Consumer Electronics

Integrated circuits (ICs) have become increasingly susceptible to counterfeiting due to globalization of the semiconductor supply chain. In this paper, this issue is addressed with a novel IC authentication approach by leveraging both on-chip (transistor and interconnect) and package-level process variations. Unique IDs are generated with this random variation by obtaining the supply-side power network impedances of packaged ICs over a certain frequency range. PowerID requires a simpler measurement setup than other offline signature generation techniques that rely on measuring path delays by generating specific input patterns. Unlike existing methods, such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs) that rely on dedicated circuit structures, this approach does not require any additional circuitry. Simulations are performed to model 1,000 IC instances and common metrics such as uniqueness (average inter-Hamming distance of 49.5%) and robustness (average intra-Hamming distance of 1%) are reported. Due to the random nature of process variations, it is highly challenging for an attacker to deliberately produce a counterfeit IC that matches the generated unique signatures.