Design of Adiabatic Dynamic Differential Logic for DPA-Resistant Secure Integrated Circuits

Production of cost-effective secure integrated chips, such as smart cards, requires hardware designers to consider tradeoffs in size, security, and power consumption. To design successful security-centric designs, the low-level hardware must contain built-in protection mechanisms to supplement cryptographic algorithms, such as advanced encryption standard and triple data encryption standard by preventing side-channel attacks, such as differential power analysis (DPA). Dynamic logic obfuscates the output waveforms and the circuit operation, reducing the effectiveness of the DPA attack. For stronger mitigation of DPA attacks, we propose the implementation of adiabatic dynamic differential logic (ADDL) for applications in secure integrated circuit (IC) design. Such an approach is effective in reducing power consumption, demonstrated using HSPICE simulations with 22-nm predictive technology. The benefits of our design are demonstrated by comparing instantaneous power waveforms and observing the magnitude of differential power spikes during switching events. First, simulation results for body biasing on subthreshold adiabatic inverters show an improvement in differential power up to 43.28% for similar inverters without body biasing. Then, a high-performance ADDL is presented for an implementation in high-frequency secure ICs. This method improves the differential power over previous dynamic and differential logic methods by up to 89.65%. Finally, we propose a body-biased ADDL for ultralow power applications. Simulation results show that the differential power was improved upon by a factor of 199.16.