The Critical Role of Pre-Silicon Security Verification with Secure-IC’s Laboryzr™ Platform

As embedded systems and System-on-Chip (SoC) designs grow in complexity and integration, the risk of physical attacks has dramatically increased. Modern day adversaries no longer rely solely on software vulnerabilities; instead, they exploit the physical properties of silicon to gain access to sensitive data. Side-channel attacks (SCA) and fault injection attacks (FIA) have emerged as some of the most potent threats, targeting the physical behavior of chips through power analysis, timing discrepancies, or induced faults. While cryptographic algorithms remain mathematically sound, their hardware implementations often betray subtle leakages that attackers can exploit.

To confront these risks proactively, Secure-IC has developed Laboryzr™, a pre-silicon security verification platform that enables hardware and software teams to simulate real-world threats and validate countermeasures during design—long before tape-out.

Why Pre-Silicon Security Matters

The financial and operational impact of discovering a security flaw post-silicon is enormous. Fixes at this stage involve redesign, re-fabrication, and potentially even product recalls. In contrast, pre-silicon verification allows vulnerabilities to be detected and resolved when the cost of change is still low. For industries such as automotive, defense, medical devices, and critical infrastructure, early detection is not only practical—it’s imperative.

Through pre-silicon security verification, organizations can align more easily with demanding security certifications like FIPS 140-3, ISO/IEC 19790, and Common Criteria. Just as importantly, they can ensure that devices are robust against real-world threats like differential power analysis or electromagnetic glitching.

Introducing Laboryzr™: A Platform for Security Sign-Off

Laboryzr™ is Secure-IC’s comprehensive platform for pre-silicon security verification. With Laboryzr, teams can measure and validate the effectiveness of security countermeasures before tape-out, transforming security sign-off from a concept into a measurable reality.

One of Laboryzr’s most powerful attributes is its ability to provide traceability from specification to silicon. By linking threat models directly to RTL and attack simulations, it ensures that security coverage is both complete and verifiable. Laboryzr™ integrates with industry EDA tools used across the SoC design flow, enabling it to catch vulnerabilities early and help reduce the need for costly post-silicon fixes.

Laboryzr’s Pre-Silicon Verification Components

Virtualyzr™ focuses on the hardware layer. It simulates and emulates side-channel and fault injection attacks at various abstraction levels—from RTL to post-synthesis—leveraging existing EDA workflows. Through the use of Value Change Dump (VCD) files, it reconstructs signal activities that mimic power or electromagnetic emissions, enabling leakage detection and exploitation analysis. It also supports fault injection modeling, including clock glitches, electromagnetic interference, and laser attacks. Originally limited to analyzing small IP blocks like AES cores, Virtualyzr™ has evolved to support full-chip and chiplet-scale analysis through advanced parallelization and optimization.

Catalyzr™ addresses the software layer, where it analyzes source code and binaries to detect vulnerabilities such as timing side channels, cache-based leakages, and improper cryptographic API usage. It performs both static and dynamic analysis to evaluate masking countermeasures, cryptographic integration, and execution behavior. With over seven years of field use, Catalyzr™ has matured into a key component of pre-silicon software security assessments.

Designed for the Modern SoC Design Flow

Laboryzr™ has been under development for more than a decade, evolving through constant customer feedback. One of the earliest challenges faced by Secure-IC was how to create a user interface that seamlessly fit into the existing SoC design flow. Originally offering only a graphical interface, Laboryzr later added a command line interface (CLI) to support CI/CD workflows and accommodate power users seeking integration into automated verification environments.

As customer demands shifted toward larger and more complex designs—including SoCs and chiplets—Laboryzr™ underwent fundamental architecture changes. Secure-IC optimized the platform for speed and scalability, enabling high-throughput simulations that could handle full-chip assessments. These improvements, along with robust support for Place and Route (PR) phases, positioned Laboryzr™ as a go-to solution for teams that require both depth and breadth in their security analysis.

Built for What’s Next: PQC, Chiplets, and Beyond

Secure-IC continues to future-proof Laboryzr™ by expanding support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and emerging chiplet-based architectures. The platform is being extended to validate PQC algorithm implementations and to analyze interactions between chiplets, especially as heterogeneous integration becomes more common in next-generation SoC design.

Secure-IC’s upcoming acquisition by Cadence also positions Laboryzr™ for even deeper integration into mainstream EDA workflows. With Cadence as an internal customer, Laboryzr™ will gain access to more complete design environments, allowing further validation of its capabilities on complex, multi-chip systems.

Market Context and Differentiation

Unlike solutions focused on software security or information flow analysis or security verification post-silicon, Secure-IC has long focused exclusively on physical attack emulation at the pre-silicon stage. Laboryzr’s tight integration with EDA flows, real-time emulation capability, and multi-layered approach make it uniquely positioned to address the needs of design teams working from RTL to place and route.

Summary

As hardware security threats continue to evolve, the need for comprehensive, early-stage verification is greater than ever. Security must be engineered with the same rigor and traceability as functional requirements. Secure-IC’s Laboryzr™ platform represents a significant advancement in how security is implemented, validated, and signed off in the silicon lifecycle. It empowers chip developers to simulate threats, validate defenses, and certify hardware security—before silicon is produced.

By enabling early detection of physical vulnerabilities, linking threat models to design data, and providing automation-ready interfaces for hardware and software teams, Laboryzr™ delivers a true shift-left security solution. Its continued development in areas like PQC and chiplet support ensures that it remains at the cutting edge of security verification.

To learn more, you can visit the following pages:

Laboryzr brochure page

Laboryzr product page

Catalyzr product page

Virtualyzr product page