Efficient and secure on-chip reconfigurable voltage regulation for IoT devices

Abstract

The emergence of internet of things (IoT) devices is challenging the conventional design targets for integrated systems such as performance, power efficiency, and cost. With the proliferation of IoT devices, ensuring safe operating margins will become more crucial due to the limited power budget and physical constraints. Additionally, IoT devices are vulnerable to hardware attacks as they may be easily accessible to an attacker. The limitations when combined with the cost constraints make the design of security measures for the IoT devices quite challenging. In this perspective paper, reconfigurable voltage regulators are investigated to simultaneously improve the overall power efficiency of the system and provide enhanced security against certain side-channel attacks. A brief survey of randomized reconfiguration of voltage regulators to scramble to power consumption profile is proposed. The randomized reconfiguration makes the the synchronization of the attack more dificult for the attacker, boosting the security benefits of conventional voltage regulators with negligible power and area overhead.