Experimental Evaluation for Detecting Aging Effect on Microcontrollers based on Side-Channel Analysis

Electronic devices are in danger of being unsafe or unreliable since counterfeit integrated circuits (ICs) including recycled ones are on the market while a demand for semiconductor devices is increasing. Especially, MOSFETs in recycled ICs have commonly higher threshold voltage and slower switching speed than new ones, then we have a possibility to observe the aging effects of ICs electromagnetic (EM) emission. In this paper, we focus on around fundamental frequency band given by the clock signal fed into microcontroller, where significant side-channel information is commonly observed, and show a set of experiments to measure voltage variations around the fundamental frequency and lower one from new (unaged) ICs and aged ICs. Through the experiments, we confirm the possibility that we can distinguish aged microcontrollers from unaged ones by this method.