IC-ResQ Lab

Lead with an impactful statement

"If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions, and potential."

◄ Elon Musk

Research Activities @ IC-ResQ Lab.

Aging Sensor and Mitigation Scheme

The device reliability issues such as Bias Temperature Instability (BTI), Hot Carrier Injection (HCI), and Time-Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) are emerging as challenging issues that limit the lifetime of Integrated Circuits (ICs) and VLSI systems. Circuit aging caused by the device reliability issues not only degrades the performance of systems but also can generate hard failures. The reliability issue becomes exacerbated in advanced technologies where circuit-level solutions are strongly required. In this research topic, we are investigating various circuit techniques that can accurately measure the aging effect in different types of circuits and design time aging resilient circuit designing.

Radiation Hardened Circuit Designs

Nanometric VLSI circuits are susceptible to radiation-induced soft error effects. The data stored at sensitive nodes temporarily flips under the effect of very intense radiation in this event, resulting in data corruption. Cosmic ray particles and the intense radioactive decay of uranium and thorium impurities are the two main causes of these disruptions. Soft errors occur whenever a critical charge and result in debased node capacitances, high clock frequencies, and coupled supply voltage of more compact chips. To overcome these challenges, one could aim to increase node capacitance by raising the supply voltage, which would increase the critical charge at the sensitive node. In this research arena, we design and examine numerous high-performance digital circuits, robust to radiation across design time and develop new soft error mitigation schemes.

Leakage Power Attack Resilient Memory

Security is an ever-increasing requirement in the field of information technology to safeguard systems and data from unauthorized access. Most security solutions (such as symmetric and asymmetric key-based cryptography) rely on a large and unpredictable secret key to overcome the limitations of frequently used mathematical reduction procedures in defending against various malicious attacks thus making realization difficult and expensive. Key storage and retrieval can be vulnerable to memory attacks employing software and physical techniques that can read data from random access memory chips. During their execution, many side-channel attacks (SCAs) target digital platforms. In this research topic, we have discussed leakage power-based SCAs and proposed a novel leakage power attack resilient SRAM cell having better noise margin and resilience to LPA-based SCA.

Physically Unclonable Functions

Authentication is an essential cryptographic primitive that confirms the identity of parties during communications. For security, it is important that these identities are complex, in order to make them difficult to clone or guess. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a device that exploits inherent randomness introduced during manufacturing to give a physical entity a unique ‘fingerprint’ or trust anchor. These devices are of potential use in a variety of applications from anticounterfeiting, identification, authentication and key generation to advanced protocols such as oblivious transfer, key exchange, key renovation, and virtual proof of reality. In this research topic, we are investigating various PUF circuits utilizing the device variability during manufacturing.

True Random Number Generators

Today, Securing the information/confidential data from the attacker is the most important aspect. A true random number generator is one of the Hardware security primitives which generate the random bits. The TRNG is a non-algorithmic system that produces randomness from the internal noise of the circuits. With the help of these fluctuations, it produces a random sequence because the attacker cannot control the fluctuation pattern. The main application of the TRNG is cryptography. The random bits generated from these fluctuations can be used as secret keys. The TRNG provides better protection for sensitive digital data such as credit card details, and passwords. In our research, we are working on designing a circuit with zero hardware cost which means no external circuits are used to get the highest level of randomness.

Next-Generation QCA based Digital Circuit Designs

The realm of QCA developed as a reflection of the integration of Quantum Mechanics and Digital Logic designing, wherein the orientation of electrons in the Quantum-dots is exploited for data manipulation and storage. Owing to the impressive advantages, QCA is regarded as one of the potential alternatives to CMOS technology for Digital designing and fabrication. The reliability and security of QCA designs is hitherto a domain demanding research in order to enhance the possibility of implementation. We develop novel QCA designs and evaluate them against different possible fabrication faults, temperature variations, attempted snooping, and power analysis attacks in order to enhance the designs.

"समर्पण आपके सफलता की प्रेरणा है।"

"Dedication is the Motivation for your Success."