TLGLock: A New Approach in Logic Locking Using Key-Driven Charge Recycling in Threshold Logic Gates
About
Logic locking remains one of the most promising defenses against hardware piracy, yet current approaches often face challenges in scalability and design overhead. In this paper, we present TLGLock, a new design paradigm that leverages the structural expressiveness of Threshold Logic Gates (TLGs) and the energy efficiency of charge recycling to enforce key-dependent functionality at the gate level. By embedding the key into the gate's weighted logic and utilizing dynamic charge sharing, TLGLock provides a stateless and compact alternative to conventional locking techniques. We implement a complete synthesis-to-locking flow and evaluate it using ISCAS, ITC, and MCNC benchmarks. Results show that TLGLock achieves up to 30% area, 50% delay, and 20% power savings compared to latch-based locking schemes. In comparison with XOR and SFLL-HD methods, TLGLock offers up to 3x higher SAT attack resistance with significantly lower overhead. Furthermore, randomized key-weight experiments demonstrate that TLGLock can reach up to 100% output corruption under incorrect keys, enabling tunable security at minimal cost. These results position TLGLock as a scalable and resilient solution for secure hardware design.