Contactless transmission of intellectual property data to protect FPGA designs

Over the past 10 years, the designers of intellectual properties (IP) have faced increasing threats including illegal copy or cloning, counterfeiting, reverse-engineering. This is now a critical issue for the microelectronics industry, mainly for fabless designers and FPGA designers. The design of a secure, efficient, lightweight protection scheme for design data is a serious challenge for the hardware security community. In this context, this paper presents the first ultra-lightweight transmitter using side channel leakage based on electromagnetic emanation to send embedded IP identity discreetly and quickly. In addition, we present our electromagnetic test bench and a coherent demodulation method using slippery window spectral analysis to recover data outside the device. The hardware resources occupied by the transmitter represent less than 0.022% of a 130 nm Microsemi Fusion FPGA. Experimental results show that the demodulation method success to provide IP data with a bit rate equal to 500 Kbps.