Layout-Aware Scan-Cell Reordering for Improving Localized Switching to Detect Hardware Trojans

Malicious activities and alterations in integrated circuits have raised serious concerns to government agencies and semiconductor industry. The added functionality, known as hardware Trojan, poses great detection and isolation challenges. This paper presents a novel layout-aware scan-cell reordering method to localize design switching into a specific region and improve hardware Trojan detection. The proposed method forms scan chains by considering the physical information of scan cells. The new scan architecture allows activating any target region and keeping others quiet. This will help magnify Trojan impact on total circuit transient power. Random patterns are used to generate switching in the target regions. The proposed method is aimed at improving the efficiency of power-based side-channel analysis methods for detecting hardware Trojans. The experimental results show that our proposed method significantly increases Trojan-to-circuit power consumption ratio.