IR-drop calibration for Hardware Trojan detection

Process variation is the critical issue in hardware Trojan detection. In the state-of-art works, ring oscillators are employed to address this problem. But ring oscillators are very sensitive to IR-drop effect, which exists ICs. In this paper, based on circuit theory, a IR-drop calibration method is proposed. The nominal power supply voltage and the others power supply voltage with a very small difference of the nominal power supply voltage are applied to the test chip. It is assumed that they have the same IR-drop ΔV. Combined with these measured data, the value of V _th + ΔV, can be obtained by mathematic analysis. The typical V _th from circuit simulation is used to compute ΔV. We studied the proposed method in a tested chip.