Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, offers several advantages, including on-site production, enhanced throughput, and efficient use of raw materials. However, the rise in its usage has also led to an increase in potential threats that aim to disrupt the printing process. These attacks can subtly alter the design (CAD or STL) files or machine instructions (g-code), which can cause significant economic and reputational harm to the victim company. Current detection techniques, based on acoustic, magnetic, and accelerationbased side-channel analysis, have proven to be ineffective. Although power side-channel analysis is more effective than other means, it is expensive and not scalable. This paper proposes a novel detection method, SCREAM, that assumes the user has access to a trusted STL source and an untrusted g-code. SCREAM leverages the pulse trains sent to the motors to reconstruct the executing g-code. To ensure the safe and accurate execution of g-code, a three-level comparison is performed between recovered and untrusted g-code, as well as trusted STL ensuring successful detection of any anomalies present in the executing g-code. Our testing has shown that this method can detect a range of existing attacks on AM, including malicious firmware manipulation, FLAW3D, and Needle in a Haystack.

GenAI Units In Digital Design Education (GUIDE) is an open courseware repository with runnable Google Colab labs and other materials. We describe the repository’s architecture and educational approach based on standardized teaching units comprising slides, short videos, runnable labs, and related papers. This organization enables consistency for both the students’ learning experience and the reuse and grading by instructors. We demonstrate GUIDE in practice with three representative units: VeriThoughts for reasoning and formal-verification-backed RTL generation, enhanced LLM-aided testbench generation, and LLMPirate for IP Piracy. We also provide details for four example course instances (GUIDE4ChipDesign, Build your ASIC, GUIDE4HardwareSecurity, and Hardware Design) that assemble GUIDE units into full semester offerings, learning outcomes, and capstone projects, all based on proven materials. For example, the GUIDE4HardwareSecurity course includes a project on LLM-aided hardware Trojan insertion that has been successfully deployed in the classroom and in Cybersecurity Games and Conference (CSAW), a student competition and academic conference for cybersecurity. We also organized an NYU Cognichip Hackathon, engaging students across 24 international teams in AI-assisted RTL design workflows. The GUIDE repository is open for contributions and available at: https://github.com/FCHXWH823/LLM4ChipDesign.

Traditionally, digital hardware designs are written in the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) and debugged manually by engineers. This can be time-consuming and error-prone for complex designs. Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a potential tool to help generate fully functioning HDL code, but most works have focused on generation in the single-shot capacity: i.e., run and evaluate, a process that does not leverage debugging and, as such, does not adequately reflect a realistic development process. In this work, we evaluate the ability of LLMs to leverage feedback from electronic design automation (EDA) tools to fix mistakes in their own generated Verilog. To accomplish this, we present an open-source, highly customizable framework, AutoChip, which combines conversational LLMs with the output from Verilog compilers and simulations to iteratively generate and repair Verilog. To determine the success of these LLMs we leverage the VerilogEval benchmark set. We evaluate four state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, focusing on readily accessible commercial models. EDA tool feedback proved to be consistently more effective than zero-shot prompting only with GPT-4o, the most computationally complex model we evaluated. In the best case, we observed a 5.8% increase in the number of successful designs with a 34.2% decrease in cost over the best zero-shot results. Mixing smaller models with this larger model at the end of the feedback iterations resulted in equally as much success as with GPT-4o using feedback, but incurred 41.9% lower cost (corresponding to an overall decrease in cost over zero-shot by 89.6%).

Cybersecurity threats in Additive Manufacturing (AM) are an increasing concern as AM adoption continues to grow. AM is now being used for parts in the aerospace, transportation, and medical domains. Threat vectors which allow for part compromise are particularly concerning, as any failure in these domains would have life-threatening consequences. A major challenge to investigation of AM part-compromises comes from the difficulty in evaluating and benchmarking both identified threat vectors as well as methods for detecting adversarial actions. In this work, we introduce a generalized platform for systematic analysis of attacks against and defenses for 3D printers. Our “OFFRAMPS” platform is based on the open-source 3D printer control board “RAMPS.“ Offramps allows analysis, recording, and modification of all control signals and I/O for a 3D printer. We show the efficacy of Offramps by presenting a series of case studies based on several Trojans, including ones identified in the literature, and show that Offramps can both emulate and detect these attacks, i.e., it can both change and detect arbitrary changes to the g-code print commands.