Anti-clone

IC piracy has caused companies economic damages from loss of company reputation to loss of market share. The problem exists because pirates find it easier to reverse engineer and counterfeit a competitor product on the market than to invest time and resources in product research and development. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), device-specific output based on production variability, can be used to fight counterfeiting by obfuscating a chip’s functionality. Each chip can be individually modified to hide the chip’s actual functionality from the pirates. The correct functionality of the chip can only be enabled through authentication. Since each instance of the obfuscated chip is different, PUF-based obfuscation can effectively mitigate piracy attacks.