The increase in the number of counterfeit and recycled microelectronic chips in recent years has created significant security and safety concerns in various applications. Hence, detecting such counterfeit chips in electronic systems is critical before deployment in the field. Unfortunately, the conventional verification tools using physical inspection and side-channel methods are costly, unscalable, error-prone, and often incompatible with legacy systems. This paper introduces a generic non-invasive and low-cost counterfeit chip detection based on characterizing the impedance of the system's power delivery network (PDN). Our method relies on the fact that the impedance of the counterfeit and recycled chips differs from the genuine ones. To sense such impedance variations confidently, we deploy scattering parameters, frequently used for impedance characterization of RF/microwave circuits. Our proposed approach can directly be applied to soldered chips on the system's PCB and does not require any modifications on the legacy systems. To validate our claims, we perform extensive measurements on genuine and aged samples from two families of STMicroelectronics chips to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

翻译：近年来，假冒和回收微电子芯片数量的增加在各类应用中引发了严重的安全隐患。因此，在电子系统部署前检测此类伪造芯片至关重要。遗憾的是，传统的物理检测和侧信道验证方法成本高昂、可扩展性差、易出错，且常与旧系统不兼容。本文提出一种基于系统供电网络（PDN）阻抗特征化的通用非侵入式低成本伪造芯片检测方法。该方法利用假冒和回收芯片与正品芯片在阻抗特性上的差异。为可靠感知这种阻抗变化，我们采用常用于射频/微波电路阻抗表征的散射参数。所提方案可直接应用于已焊接在系统PCB上的芯片，无需对传统系统进行任何改造。为验证方法有效性，我们对STMicroelectronics两个系列芯片的正品样本与老化样本开展了全面测量实验。