Investigation of Electromagnetic Signatures of a FPGA Using an APREL EM-ISIGHT System

Large military platforms have encountered major performance and reliability issues due to an increased number of incidents with counterfeit electronic parts. This has drawn the attention of Department of Defense (DOD) leadership making detection and avoidance of counterfeit electronic parts a top issue for national defense. More defined regulations and processes for identifying, reporting, and disposing of counterfeit electronic parts are being revised to raise awareness for this aggregating issue, as well as enhance the detection of these parts. Multiple technologies are currently employed throughout the supply chain to detect counterfeit electronic parts. These methods are often costly, time-consuming, and destructive. This research investigates a non-destructive test method that collects unintentionally radiated electromagnetic emissions from functional devices using a commercially available system, the APREL EM-ISight. A design of experiments (DOE) is created and exploited to determine the optimal test settings for measuring devices. The sensitivity of the system is analyzed by scanning a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) at the optimal test settings established from the DOE and varying the programmed signal. This research established the viability of using APRELs EM-ISight to detect a devices inherent electromagnetic signature. Another take away from this research is the tradeoff between resolution and scantime