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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.

  • Ozgur Sinanoglu elevated to IEEE Fellow, 2026.
  • Ozgur Sinanoglu inducted into the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists, United Arab Emirates, 2021.
    • Head, Membership Selection Committee (Steering Committee member)
  • Ozgur Sinanoglu received the Distinguished Faculty Research Award (inaugural), NYU Abu Dhabi, 2021.
  • Top Picks Award for our ACM CCS 2017 paper "Provably Secure Logic Locking: From Theory to Practice," 2021
  • Best Paper Award for our IEEE TETC paper “Removal Attacks on Logic Locking and Camouflaging Techniques,” 2020.
  • Semi-final (North America leg) winner “TTTC's E. J. McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award”, by PhD student Muhammad Yasin, 2018.
  • 1st place: “TTTC's E. J. McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award”, by PhD student Samah Saeed, 2014.
  • Best Student Paper Award at ACM Computer and Communication Security Conference 2013: “Security Analysis of Integrated Circuit Camouflaging,” 2013.
  • ACM Student Research Competition, 3rd place (ICCAD `13) by Jeyavijayan Rajendran for joint research on “Security Analysis of Integrated Circuit Camouflaging,” 2013.
  • Pearl Brownstein Doctoral Research Award, CSE Dept of NYU-Poly by PhD student Samah Saeed, May 2013.
  • ACM Student Research Competition, 3rd place (DAC `12) by Jeyavijayan Rajendran for joint research on “Securing Integrated Circuits through Logic Encryption,” 2012.
  • Best Paper Award at VLSI Test Symposium 2011: “Expedited Response Compaction for Scan Power Reduction,” 2011.
  • IBM Great Minds Internship Award by PhD student Sachhidh Kannan, supervised: The first to be received from the Middle East Region, 2012.
  • “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, USD 201,022, 09/12-08/14.
  • “Hardware Security and Trust for Low Power Wireless SOC Nodes”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), USD 180,000 + USD 180,000 matching by NYU = USD 360,000, 07/13-06/16, SRC/ATIC Center `13.
  • “Adapting Test Principles for VLSI Trust”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), USD 499,991, 09/13-08/16, US National Science Foundation.
  • “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, USD 463,820, 01/15-12/17.
  • “Investigations Into IC Camouflaging”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI), Ramesh Karri (co-PI), USD 400,626, 06/15-05/18. US Army Research Office (DOD).
  • “TwinLab on Hardware Security and Trust”, Ozgur Sinanoglu and Michail Maniatakos, USD 2,570,702, 06/15 – 05/19, GlobalFoundries (USD 1,396,604 in-kind support) and NYUAD Institute (match by USD 1,174,098 cash support).
  • “Belling the CAD: Towards Security-Centric Electronic System Level Design”, Ramesh Karri (PI), Ozgur Sinanoglu (co-PI), USD 498,015, 09/15-08/18, US National Science Foundation.
  • “Provably Secure and Trustworthy Electronics”, Siddharth Garg and Ozgur Sinanoglu, USD 150,000, 04/16-03/18, NYU Global Seed Grant for Collaborative Research.
  • “Low Power, Secure-By-Design Medical SoCs”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI) and Hani Saleh (co-PI, KUSTAR), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)/Mubadala Technology, USD 36,000, 05/16-04/18.
  • “ECLIPSE: Efficient Cross-Layered IP Protection SchemE”, Farinaz Koushanfar (PI from UCSD), Yiorgos Makris (PI from UT Dallas), Jeyavijayan Rajendran (PI from Texas A&M), and Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI from NYU), USD 600,000 (split equally among four universities), 6/18-12/19, DARPA OMG Program.
  • “Provably Secure Scan Locking for Obfuscation of Test and Configuration Data”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (sole PI), USD 295,000, 9/18-8/21, Intel Corporation.
  • “AISS Logic Locking”, Jeyavijayan Rajendran (PI from Texas A&M), Ozgur Sinanoglu (PI from NYU), and Yiorgos Makris (PI from UT Dallas), USD 800,000 (NYU's share: USD 270,000), 6/20-03/23, DARPA AISS Program.
  • “Logic Locking for Zero Trust RISC-V System”, Ozgur Sinanoglu (sole PI), USD 262,000, 12/22-11/25, TII, UAE.

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
Johann Knechtel Senior Research Scientist
Rupesh Karn Research Associate
Akashdeep Saha Postdoctoral Researcher
Mahmood Vawoo Dawood Naina Chip Designer
Zeng Wang PhD student, NYU Tandon ECE and NYUAD PhD Global Fellow
Pristhwish Basu Roy PhD student, NYU Tandon ECE
Saideep Srekumar Research Assistant