EM SCA White-Box Analysis-Based Reduced Leakage Cell Design and Presilicon Evaluation
Debayan Das, Mayukh Nath, Baibhab Chatterjee, Raghavan Kumar, Xiaosen Liu, Harish K. Krishnamurthy, Manoj R. Sastry, Sanu K. Mathew, Santosh Ghosh, Shreyas Sen · IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems · 2022
This work presents a white-box modeling of the electromagnetic (EM) leakage from an integrated circuit (IC) to develop EM side-channel analysis (SCA)-aware design techniques. A new digital library cell layout design technique is proposed to minimize the EM leakage and is evaluated using a high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS)-based framework. Backed by our physics-based understanding of EM radiation, the proposed double-row power grid-based digital cell layout design shows$>5\times $reduction in the EM SCA leakage compared to the traditional digital logic gate layout design. Furthermore, exploiting the magneto-quasistatic (MQS) regime of operation of the EM leakage from the CMOS circuits, the HFSS-based framework is utilized to develop a pre-silicon (Si) EM SCA evaluation technique to assess the vulnerability of cryptographic implementations against such attacks during the design phase itself.