Remote Activation of ICs for Piracy Prevention and Digital Right Management

The authors introduce a remote activation scheme that aims to protect Integrated Circuits (IC) Intellectual Property (IP) against piracy. Remote activation enables designers to lock each working IC and to then remotely enable it. The new method exploits inherent unclonable variability in modern manufacturing for unique IDentification (ID) and integrate the IDs into the circuit functionality. The objectives are realized by replication of a few states of the Finite State Machine (FSM) and adding control to the state transitions. On each chip, the added control signals are a function of the unique IDs and are thus unclonable.