On-chip Instrumentsrntrack Malicious Rtl

摘要

Innovation often depends on looking for new applications for current products and technologies. Peter L Levin, founder, president, and chief executive officer of DAFCA, used that approach in focusing the company's silicon-validation technology on the task of sniffing out semiconductors contaminated by malicious RTL (register-transfer-level) logic. DAFCA's founders didn't originally envision RTL-logic criminology as part of the company's mission. "DAFCA's mission is to deliver a framework for on-chip, at-speed, in-system validation with a combination of on-chip dynamically programmable instruments and off-chip software-analysis tools," he says. "We were blissfully unaware ... of malicious RTL [logic]." But the interactions with colleagues in industry, academia, government, and the venture-capital community that led to the founding of DAFCA also led to Levin's realization that DAFCA technology could help uncover malicious RTL logic.