Emerging Tunnel FET and Spintronics based Hardware Secure Circuit Design with Ultra-low Energy Consumption

Abstract Present CMOS technology with scaled channel lengths exhibited higher energy consumption in designing secure electronic circuits against hardware vulnerabilities and breaches. Specifically, CMOS sense amplifier based secure differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasures at scaled channel lengths show large energy consumption with increased vulnerability. Additionally, spin transfer torque magnetic tunnel junction (STT-MTJ) and CMOS based logic-in-memory (LiM) cells demonstrate high energy consumption due to the large write current requirement of STT-MTJ and poor MOS device performance at scaled channel lengths. This paper for the first time leverages emerging tunnel FET (TFET) steep-slope device characteristics and compatible non-volatile STT-MTJ devices for enhanced hardware security with ultra-low energy consumption at lower supply voltages. TFET based sense amplifier based logic (SABL) gates have been proposed that achieve 3× lower energy consumption compared to Si FinFET SABL designs. Further, utilizing TFET SABL gates, TFET Pride S-box is designed that exhibits higher DPA resilience with 3.2× lower energy consumption compared to FinFET designs. With resulted lower static power consumption, TFET SABL based crypto systems can show lower vulnerability to static power side-channel attacks. Besides, proposed STT-MTJ and TFET LiM gates achieves 4× lower energy consumption compared to STT-MTJ and FinFET designs. Moreover, these gates have been explored in logic encryption/locking technique that shows 3.1× lower energy consumption compared to STT-MTJ and FinFET based design.