A team of faculty from the NYU School of Engineering, including Ozgur Sinanoglu, Ramesh Karri, and Davood Shahrjerdi, has received a $450K research grant from Semiconductor Research Corporation. The overall goal of this research is to investigate novel aspects of NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS) for applications in hardware security. Prof. Shahrjerdi’s group at NYU WIRELESS will explore the design and fabrication of monolithically-integrated NEMS sensors for detection of invasive attacks on integrated circuits, in which the attacker uses some sort of mechanical force. Some examples for such threat models include microprobing, and reverse engineering of chips. The NEMS sensors are envisioned to be distributed across the chip and reside near the silicon integrated circuits. Shahrjerdi is the newest faculty member in NYU WIRELESS, and was previously a master inventor at the IBM T.J. Watson laboratory.