Security-aware Register Placement to Hinder Malicious Hardware Updating and Improve Trojan Detectability

Nowadays, bulk of the designers prefer to outsource some parts of their design and fabrication process to the third-part companies because of the reliability problems, manufacturing cost and time-to-market limitations. In this situation, there are a lot of opportunities for malicious alterations by the off-shore companies. In this paper, we proposed a new placement algorithm that hinders the hardware Trojan insertion or simplifies the detection process in existence of Trojans. Experimental results show that the proposed placement improves the Trojan detectability of attempted benchmarks against Trojan insertion more than 20% in reasonable cost in delay and wirelength.