Battelle (Memorial Institute), an American private applied science and technology development company, has been awarded a US patent for a method to distinguish counterfeit electronic components from genuine ones. The patent covers the use of intrinsic deterministically random properties of a chip together with a classification algorithm as a unique ID, a kind of fingerprint that can be checked against a database.

According to US patent no. 9,759,757 intrinsic deterministically random property data can be obtained from a set of authentic electronic components, processed, and clustered to create a classifier that can distinguish whether an unknown electronic component is authentic or counterfeit. Possible property data can be time domain power consumption signals, and time or spatial domain electric or magnetic field signals. This classification can be done non-destructively, quickly, and at a low cost.

The authentication technology described above is already deployed in Battelle’s commercially-available Barricade system.