Hardware and VLSI designs

Abstract

Efficient and secure hardware implementations have become a very popular topic during the last decades. In this chapter, we discuss the fundamental design approaches to successfully implement integrated circuits (ICs) as well as testing methods and optimization techniques to achieve an adequate solution for various application scenarios. A major topic handled in this chapter is security in the context of hardware implementations. We elaborate on the characteristics of modern CMOS circuits with regard to side-channel attacks and we discuss possible countermeasure approaches against such attacks. Furthermore, we describe a comprehensive practical example of combining cryptographic instruction set extensions with hardware countermeasures on a modern 32-bit processor platform. In the last section of this chapter, we argue about the assets and drawbacks of implementing test structures in digital circuits with regard to unintentionally opening security holes as well as about intentionally introducing malicious hardware structures, also called hardware Trojans.