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This blog post is about an AFRL visiting professor, Dr. Shangping Ren, whose technical contributions came to fruition after she completed her partnership with AFRL. It is a lesson learned that in the tech transfer arena, one must be diligently on the look-out for innovative ideas for early capture as protected IP.
Bob Judd, Director of Business Development, United Electronic Industries, declared that “The life cycle of many electronics systems is a long one often spanning decades and even generations. The Air Force’s F-16 is 42 years old…” whereas the B-52 is old enough that it predates the birth of all its current crews. He went on to that state that “…., both systems are still active and still need to be maintained even though they may be on third or fourth generation electronics. Industry is full of electronic systems that were developed over twenty years ago. Many of these are based on technologies, or at least products that can no longer be replaced or repaired.” Against this backdrop, the government has struggled with finding solutions. In 1985, the Government Microcircuit Applications Conference (GOMAC) initiated years of sessions dedicated to the diminishing manufacturing sources problem. I can attest, as the eventual chairman and organizer of these GOMAC sessions, that the solution posed by Dr. Ren stands apart.
It is well-known that most of a computer system’s cost is almost always the software; therefore, in the face of diminishing manufacturing sources, it becomes imperative to make any retrofitting of the underlying hardware transparent to the software.
Straightforward solutions such as a life-of-type buy clearly maintain a part’s form, fit, and function; however, they are often the most expensive type of solution and mispredictions of a system’s part replacement needs are perilous. The extent of this peril has recently come to the forefront with wide-ranging reports of counterfeit ICs being inserted into systems because more trusted sources of resupply do not exist. Counterfeits were once confined to ICs being scraped off scrapped PCBs and sold as new, but counterfeiters are now performing reverse engineering, functional die emulation, and fabricating the chips themselves. Economic loss and poor quality are not the only outcomes of counterfeit IC replacement – it creates an attack vector of malicious hardware Trojans. At a defense summit late last year, an industry expert said that this was “…the ‘perfect storm’ within the semiconductor manufacturing industry (and) is about to make landfall.”
Firms and particularly the military now try to keep their systems operational while not opening themselves up to a bigger vulnerability than they currently have. Dr. Ren undertook, during her tenure at AFRL, the seemingly unglamorous task of tackling the loss of IC replacements. Her solution of inserting a low-cost layer of virtualized hardware between the application software and the aging hardware became extraordinary because it had the innovative foresight to weather the ‘perfect storm’. Using her technique, the original software – even embedded real-time applications – runs on virtualized platforms. Meanwhile, the underlying physical hardware need not conform to obsolete parts; instead, hardware maintenance is achievable with contemporary components acquired from mainstream sources. The benefits to system maintainers, in the military, in firms – in particular those in developing countries – are: preservation of the application software investment, freedom to pursue economical parts replacement, and suppression of the malicious hardware threat through IC counterfeiting.
After initial support from AFRL Dr. Ren eventually obtained NSF funding to advance this idea to a form that would have been patentable. AFRL does have patent-pending/patented inventions on combating hardware Trojans, but not on Dr. Ren’s discovery. Hindsight is always 2020 but having seen what transpired in the case of Dr. Ren, this member of the CAESAR Group has had his vision adjusted to better perceive what early-stage research can do.
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