# ChipletQuake: On-Die Digital Impedance Sensing for Chiplet and Interposer Verification

**Authors:** Saleh Khalaj Monfared, Maryam Saadat Safa, Shahin Tajik

PMC · DOI: 10.3390/s25154861 · Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025-08-07

## TL;DR

ChipletQuake is a new framework that improves the security of chiplet-based systems by detecting tampering through digital impedance sensing.

## Contribution

Introduces ChipletQuake, a novel on-die framework for verifying chiplet and interposer security without additional hardware.

## Key findings

- ChipletQuake detects tamper events in interposers and neighboring chiplets using PDN impedance sensing.
- The framework identifies passive and subtle malicious circuits compatible with FPGA-based chiplets.
- Demonstrated effectiveness in detecting hardware Trojans and interposer tampering.

## Abstract

The increasing complexity and cost of manufacturing monolithic chips have driven the semiconductor industry toward chiplet-based designs, where smaller, modular chiplets are integrated onto a single interposer. While chiplet architectures offer significant advantages, such as improved yields, design flexibility, and cost efficiency, they introduce new security challenges in the horizontal hardware manufacturing supply chain. These challenges include risks of hardware Trojans, cross-die side-channel and fault injection attacks, probing of chiplet interfaces, and intellectual property theft. To address these concerns, this paper presents ChipletQuake, a novel on-chiplet framework for verifying the physical security and integrity of adjacent chiplets during the post-silicon stage. By sensing the impedance of the power delivery network (PDN) of the system, ChipletQuake detects tamper events in the interposer and neighboring chiplets without requiring any direct signal interface or additional hardware components. Fully compatible with the digital resources of FPGA-based chiplets, this framework demonstrates the ability to identify the insertion of passive and subtle malicious circuits, providing an effective solution to enhance the security of chiplet-based systems. To validate our claims, we showcase how our framework detects hardware Trojans and interposer tampering.

## Full-text entities

- **Chemicals:** silicon (MESH:D012825)

## Full text

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## Figures

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## References

37 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12349434/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12349434