Introduction to the Special Issue on CAD for Security: Pre-silicon Security Sign-off Solutions Through Design Cycle.

This introduction welcomes all readers to this ACM JETC special issue on CAD for Security: Pre-silicon Security Sign-off Solutions Through Design Cycle. The articles published in this special issue reflect how computer-aided design (CAD) tools are developed to expand the notion of automated security verification throughout the system-on-chip (SoC) design cycle. This special issue aims to demonstrate how the semiconductor industry must look for security-oriented metrics and evaluation as part of automatic CAD solution development to aid analysis, identifying, root-causing, and mitigating SoC security problems. Throughout this introductory note, we first represent the need for such a security-oriented sign-off solution for the ASIC design flow, then it is followed by providing an overview of the articles published in this special issue and how they address such requirements.