Concerted Wire Lifting: Enabling Secure and Cost-Effective Split Manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wire lifting technique using custom elevating cells to enhance security in split manufacturing, achieving zero IP theft success rate with manageable PPA overheads.

Contribution

It proposes effective strategies and new metrics for secure split manufacturing, including custom elevating cells and the PNR metric, improving security and reducing costs.

Findings

Achieves 0% correct connection rate in benchmarks

Outperforms recent protection schemes in security

Maintains low and controllable PPA overheads

Abstract

Here we advance the protection of split manufacturing (SM)-based layouts through the judicious and well-controlled handling of interconnects. Initially, we explore the cost-security trade-offs of SM, which are limiting its adoption. Aiming to resolve this issue, we propose effective and efficient strategies to lift nets to the BEOL. Towards this end, we design custom "elevating cells" which we also provide to the community. Further, we define and promote a new metric, Percentage of Netlist Recovery (PNR), which can quantify the resilience against gate-level theft of intellectual property (IP) in a manner more meaningful than established metrics. Our extensive experiments show that we outperform the recent protection schemes regarding security. For example, we reduce the correct connection rate to 0\% for commonly considered benchmarks, which is a first in the literature. Besides, we induce reasonably low and controllable overheads on power, performance, and area (PPA). At the same time, we also help to lower the commercial cost incurred by SM.