Standard Cell Tuning Enables Data-Independent Static Power Consumption

Abstract

Physical attacks, namely invasive, observation and combined, represent a great challenge for today’s digital design. Successful class of strategies adopted by industry, allowing hiding data dependency of the side channel emissions in CMOS is based on balancing. Although attacks on CMOS dynamic power represent a class of state-of-the-art attacks, vulnerabilities exploiting data dependency in CMOS static power and light- modulated static power were recently presented. In this paper, we describe structures and techniques developed to enhance and balance traditional static CMOS bulk structures. To enable data dependency hiding, we propose low-level techniques based on complementary-value induced balancing currents, constant current source behavioral approximation, and light-sensing capability of traditional CMOS structures. The proposed techniques may be used to build a dual-rail circuit balanced from both perspectives: static and dynamic power. The publicly available TSMC180nm node standard cell simulation is used for evaluation.