ALPHACORE INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF161-140

Description

ABSTRACT: In this Air Force SBIR program Alphacore, Inc. proposes to develop and implement integrated circuit (IC) design and analysis techniques for authentication, identification, and reliability monitoring of radio frequency (RF) microelectronics.The specific devices under test (DUTs) targeted in this work are configurable low noise amplifiers (LNAs), voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs), and active mixers.The developed techniques provide less than 20% area and less than 15% performance overhead in key parameters (e.g., gain, noise figure, phase noise, IIP3, P1dB etc.) as compared with state-of-the-art performance at equal power.The techniques provide greater than 90 percent confidence in authenticity and greater than 99 percent unique identification.The developed techniques will provide non-destructive evaluation to determine unique chip identifiers (UIDs) for authentication as well as monitor for degradation and flag an impending failure.BIST and DUT will be co-designed during the design phase to alleviate any negative performance impact while achieving high characterization accuracy. UIDs will be generated by digitally coding performance parameters that are characterized by the BIST circuit. Multiple supply (Vdd) states will be used to sensitize the circuit performance to process, thereby increasing the hamming distance (HD) of the UIDs generated.; BENEFIT: The total cost of the employment of counterfeit electronics can be estimated as 100 billion U.S. dollars per year. The issue of counterfeit electronics is growing and while there is a critical need for solutions in the DoD supply chain, the need is also imminent for other high-reliability electronic industries, such as medical, aerospace and automotive industries.The results of this work are built-in self-test (BIST) IP blocks for RF electronics, including LNAs, mixers, and VCOs. These BIST circuits monitor the performance of the device under test (DUT) periodically to predict the remaining lifetime. The readout from the BIST circuit will also be used to generate an unclonable unique ID (UID) for authenticating, identifying, and tracking chips in the supply chain. Cloned, recycled, or unauthorized excess chips can immediately be flagged using the UIDs that are not in the vendor database.