Chapter 4
Recycled FPGA Detection
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been extensively used in modern electronic systems because of their lower nonrecurring engineering and design costs, instant availability, high performance, and power benefits. Reports indicate that previously used or recycled FPGAs are infiltrating the electronics supply chain making the security and reliability of the critical systems and networks vulnerable. In this chapter, we discuss FPGA aging to understand the nature of recycled components and explained how to detect recycled FPGA with or without access to golden reference data using the exhaustive look-up-table (LUT) path delay characterization and also demonstrate how to distinguish new from used/recycled FPGAs by detecting partially used, fully used, and spare LUTs in FPGAs exhibiting different aging behaviors.