Non-Thermally Cured, Active Coatings for Anti-Tamper Protection

The use and effectiveness of anti-tamper technologies will help to more readily bring means of protecting our technology to a point of maturation that allows them to be used in current and new systems. To assist in this process, the efforts proposed here will provide Army and other DoD Program Managers a more cost effective set of tools to implement anti-tamper processes in critical U.S. electronics systems. The focus here is on innovative techniques to foil an adversary's reverse engineering of electronics microelectronics, modules, and boards. The approach described herein highly leverages cutting-edge existing commercially available semiconductor processes such as combustion chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) and atomic layer deposition (ALD), uniquely combined with fillers such as emerging nanotechnology materials (e.g. carbon nanotubes and buckyballs). The combination of these technologies appears to hold great promise for providing an effective anti-tamper approach.