Tunnel FET Current Mode Logic for DPA-Resilient Circuit Designs

Abstract

Emerging devices have been designed and fabricated to extend Moore's Law. While traditional metrics such as power, energy, delay, and area certainly apply to emerging device technologies, new devices may offer additional benefits in addition to improvements in the aforementioned metrics. In this sense, we consider how new transistor technologies could also have a positive impact on hardware security. More specifically, we consider how tunnel transistors (TFETs) could offer superior protection to integrated circuits and embedded systems that are subjected to hardware-level attacks - e.g., differential power analysis (DPA). Experimental results on a light-weight cryptographic circuit, KATAN32, show that TFET-based current mode logic (CML) can both improve DPA resilience and preserve low power consumption in the target design. Compared to the CMOS-based CML designs, the TFET CML circuit consumes 15 times less power while achieving a similar level of DPA resistance.