VLSI MODULES FOR POWER SUPPLY MONITOR AND POWER ANALYSIS COUNTERMEASURE

In today's technologies, it is critical to monitor power supply variations due to their negative impact on performance and integrity of the system. These variations are difficult to estimate accurately during the design phase due to their strong dependence on various parasitic elements, both on-chip and off-chip as well as process dependence of local switching activity. Therefore on-chip power supply monitoring is required to provide feedback to the design flow or provide inputs to any mechanism that actively compensates for power supply noise errors. Interestingly, some of these power supply fluctuation characteristics have been exploited by various iDDT test techniques for defect screening. In cryptographical application, power consumption variations seen off-chip are a rich source of information for the intruders to obtain secret materials from the system. An attacker can use various techniques to analyze power consumption information of a cryptographic device to gain an understanding of its internal operation. Consequently, these side-channel information need to be masked to make it very difficult or practically impossible to perform power analysis on the secured system. In this work, we propose on-chip monitoring and power analysis countermeasure solutions that can be used concurrently for these allied applications. The circuits 1) are designed to measure multiple power supply parameters and provide protection against power analysis attack 2) can be calibrated for process tolerance and 3) can be used on most logic cores without modification