Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip Design with Adaptive Key Rotation Aware Obfuscation

Abstract

The global semiconductor industry surpassed USD 790 billion in revenue during 2025, while modern multicore and AI processors integrate hundreds of processing elements that generate massive on-chip communication traffic. Industry studies indicate that communication latency and interconnect overhead account for a significant portion of overall System-on-Chip (SoC) performance degradation, making efficient and secure Network-on-Chip (NoC) communication a critical design requirement. NoC architectures are extensively utilized in artificial intelligence accelerators, cloud data-center processors, autonomous vehicles, high-performance computing systems, edge devices, and advanced mobile SoCs, where reliable and secure packet transmission is essential for maintaining computational efficiency. Existing NoC security architectures based on centralized logic obfuscation and distributed interconnect obfuscation provide basic protection against unauthorized access and hardware attacks; however, they suffer from limitations such as static key management, increased routing complexity, higher latency, congestion sensitivity, scalability constraints, excessive Look-Up Table (LUT) utilization, increased power consumption, and limited adaptability to dynamic attack scenarios. To address these challenges, this work proposes a Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip (HNoC) with Adaptive Key Rotation Aware Obfuscation (AKRAO) architecture. The proposed framework integrates Input Switching Allocation with Buffer Management, Forwarding Buffer, Dynamic Look-Ahead Bypass Route Computation, Shortest Path Computation, Parallel Virtual Channel and Switch Allocation, Adaptive Key Rotation, and Crossbar Switching with Obfuscation within a unified routing architecture. The adaptive key rotation mechanism continuously updates security credentials to enhance resistance against key compromise, traffic analysis, and side-channel attacks, while intelligent routing and forwarding strategies reduce congestion and communication delays. Consequently, the proposed AKRAO-enabled HNoC improves throughput, routing efficiency, security robustness, scalability, resource utilization, and energy efficiency, making it highly suitable for next-generation heterogeneous multicore and manycore VLSI systems.