FELOPi: A Framework for Simulation and Evaluation of Post-Layout File Against Optical Probing

Abstract

Optical Probing (OP) has been shown to be capable of retrieving intellectual property of the chips. However, to design a robust circuit against OP, the chip must be designed, fabricated, and optically probed in an experimental setup to determine the OP robustness of the design which is time consuming. To mitigate the aforementioned problems, we propose a simulation framework, namely FELOPi, which takes the layout file format of a design as an input and then performs OP on it. FELOPi can help designers to design robust circuits toward OP attacks before fabricating the chip. Hence, utilizing FELOPi results in tremendous time and cost reduction.