  Due to the ever-growing demands for electronic chips in different sectors the
semiconductor companies have been mandated to offshore their manufacturing
processes. This unwanted matter has made security and trustworthiness of their
fabricated chips concerning and caused creation of hardware attacks. In this
condition, different entities in the semiconductor supply chain can act
maliciously and execute an attack on the design computing layers, from devices
to systems. Our attack is a hardware Trojan that is inserted during mask
generation/fabrication in an untrusted foundry. The Trojan leaves a footprint
in the fabricated through addition, deletion, or change of design cells. In
order to tackle this problem, we propose Explainable Vision System for Hardware
Testing and Assurance (EVHA) in this work that can detect the smallest possible
change to a design in a low-cost, accurate, and fast manner. The inputs to this
system are Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images acquired from the
Integrated Circuits (ICs) under examination. The system output is determination
of IC status in terms of having any defect and/or hardware Trojan through
addition, deletion, or change in the design cells at the cell-level. This
article provides an overview on the design, development, implementation, and
analysis of our defense system.
