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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… Click to show full abstract
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.