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Design For Excellence Lab

We are a research team at New York University Abu Dhabi, whose main focus is the reliability and security of electronic chips. With the increasing complexity of designs, enhanced capabilities of engraving smaller transistors on silicon, and low-power, high-performance operation requirements, integrated circuits are becoming more and more vulnerable to reliability and security threats.

Electronic chips manufactured today exhibit a higher defect rate, fail more often during their mission-mode operation, die quicker in the field, and thanks to globalization and outsourcing, are more prone to security threats such as counterfeiting, IP piracy and hardware trojans.

Our mission is to design these electronic chips with built-in defense mechanisms, in order to expose defective chips more easily and cost-effectively, make them resilient to errors during mission mode, expose any intentional malicious alteration of the chips and protect design IP from reverse engineering. We develop Design-for-Excellence techniques comprising of hardware design blocks and accompanying software CAD tools.

  • “Adaptive Test Strategies for Minimum Energy Electronic Systems”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI) and Sule Ozev (co-PI, Arizona State University), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)/Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of UAE, $201,022, 09/12-08/14
  • “Hardware Security and Trust for Low Power Wireless SOC Nodes”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), $180,000 + $180,000 matching by NYU = $360,000, SRC/ATIC Center `13, 07/13-06/16
  • “Adapting Test Principles for VLSI Trust”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), US National Science Foundation, $499,991, 09/13-08/16
  • “Security and Test Implications of NEMS”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI) and Ramesh Karri (co-PI) and Davood Shahrjerdi (co-PI), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)/Mubadala Technology, $463,820, 01/15-12/17
  • “Investigations Into IC Camouflaging”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), US Army Research Office (DOD), $400,626, 06/15-05/18
  • “TwinLab on Hardware Security and Trust”, Ozgur Sinanoglu and Michail Maniatakos, $2,570,702, GlobalFoundries ($1,396,604 in-kind support) and NYUAD Institute (match by $1,174,098 cash support), 06/15-05/19
  • “Belling the CAD: Towards Security-Centric Electronic System Level Design”, Ramesh Karri (PI), Ozgur Sinanoglu (co-PI), US National Science Foundation, $498,015, 09/15-08/18
  • “Provably Secure and Trustworthy Electronics”, Siddharth Garg and Ozgur Sinanoglu, NYU Global Seed Grant for Collaborative Research, $150,000, 04/16-03/18
  • “Low Power, Secure-By-Design Medical SoCs”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI) and Hani Saleh (co-PI, KUSTAR), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)/Mubadala Technology, $36,000, 05/16-04/17

Unhackable Chip

Landmark achievements in IT security are happening here. For the first time, our researchers developed a computer chip with security implemented at the lowest possible level, the hardware level. "Logic-locked" chips can't be hacked or copied, providing future users with new guarantees of security for their devices.

Lab Members

Name Title
Lilas Mhd Salem Alrahis Postdoctoral Researcher
Johann Knechtel Postdoctoral Researcher
Satwik Patnaik PhD student, NYU Tandon ECE and NYUAD PhD Global Fellow
Abhrajit Sengupta PhD student, NYU Tandon ECE and NYUAD PhD Global Fellow
Nimisha Limaye PhD student, NYU Tandon ECE and NYUAD PhD Global Fellow
Mohammed Ashraf IC Designer/Research Engineer
Mohammed Nabeel IC Designer/Research Engineer