Biography & Scholarship
Dr. Zain Ul Abideen’s research focuses on hardware security while ensuring the trust and security of integrated circuits (ICs), addressing challenges in secure chip design, system integrity, and privacy. His research interests span security-aware electronic design automation (EDA) protection against reverse engineering, circuit obfuscation, and post-quantum cryptographic accelerators. He also develops hardware security primitives such as physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and true random number generators (TRNGs), alongside fault-tolerant digital systems and machine learning/AI-assisted chip design.
Prior to joining the University of Idaho, Dr. Abideen was a researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He holds a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technology from Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia.