Research Project Proposal: IP Protection through Logic Locking at Register-Transfer Level

The integrated circuit (IC) supply chain is the process that realizes a physical chip starting from its design. The entire process is becoming more and more distributed across different parties [8]. In fact most digital design houses are becoming fabless due to increasing manufacturing costs. The introduction of third-party entities in the IC supply chain brings new security challenges [1]. The major concerns are related to reverse engineering for intellectual property (IP) theft or for introduction of malicious modifications in the design [8]. The estimated loss due to IP violations alone was of $4 billions in 2008 [7] while the total loss from IC counterfeiting was estimated to be about $169 billions in 2011 [4]. This clearly shows that hardware protection techniques such as logic locking are crucial for the IC industry [8].