Anti-Tamper Active and Passive Sensors for Use Inside an Integrated Circuit

The innovative in-chip sensor technology, integrated chip protection (ICP), proposed by Accord provides a new hardware design and production technique to delay reverse engineering and exploitation, denying an adversary information about the chip design. The target product is a device that secures integrated circuits from reverse engineering. Intrusive attacks, including minute modifications to a covering package, are detected by the proposed active sensing layer, which responds accordingly. Thus, the ICP anti-tamper technology provides very high sensitivity to physical tampering intrusion attacks. Integrated sensor and detection processing provides false alarm rejection and compensation for the environment’s impact on the sensor. In addition, the innovation provides sensitive layers that can detect X-ray or other penetrating radiation that have impinged on the integrated circuit substrate and its package. If exposed to imaging levels of radiation during quiescence this detection layer enables secure circuit activation only if there has been no intrusion during the interim between powered missions.