Assessing body built-in current sensors for detection of multiple transient faults

Abstract

Over the last few years, many architectures of body or bulk built-in current sensors (BBICSs) have been proposed to detect transient faults (TFs) in integrated circuits, all of them assessed through simulations in which only single TFs affect the circuit under run-time test. This work assesses and demonstrates the ability of a BBICS architecture in also detecting multiple and simultaneous TFs. Based on the classical double-exponential transient current model, multiple fault effects on a case-study circuit have been simulated with the injection of several current sources approximately representing the Gaussian distribution of a laser beam attack. Results show the BBICS architecture is able to detect multiple TFs simultaneously perturbing sensitive nodes of the case-study circuit.