One of the most important sources of switching noise and power consumption in large VLSI circuits is the clock generation and distribution tree. This paper analyzes how the use of an asymmetric clock can be an important solution to reduce the switching noise generated by the global clock, with a very reduced degradation in performances and reliability. The suited sizing of clock generators and the design of asymmetric clock tree cells, show the benefits of the proposed technique, validated through a design example where a 50% of noise reduction is achieved with 10% of loss in operation frequency and no penalty, even saving, in power consumption.

The buffer insertion has been a mechanism widely used to increase the performances of advanced VLSI digital circuits and systems. The driver or repeater used to this purpose has effect on the timing characteristics on the signal on the wire, as propagation delay, signal integrity, transition time, among others. The power concerns related to buffering have also received much attention, because of the low power requirements of modern integrated systems. In the same way, the buffer insertion has strong impact on the reliability of synchronous systems, since the suited distribution of clock requires reduced or controlled clock-skew, being the buffer and wire sizing, a crucial aspect. In a different way, buffer insertion has been also used to reduce noise generation, especially in heavily loaded nets, since the inclusion of buffers help to desynchronize signal transitions. However, the inclusion of buffers of inverters to improve one or more of these characteristics have often negative effect on another parameters, as it happens in the average and peak of supply current. Mainly, the inclusion of a buffer to reduce noise (peak power), via desynchronizing transitions, could introduce more dynamic consumption, but reducing the short-circuit current because of the increment of signal slope. Thus, the average/peak current optimization can be considered a design trade-off. In this paper, the mechanism to obtain an average/peak power optimization procedure are presented. Selected examples show the feasibility of minimizing switching noise with negligible impact on average power consumption.

The objective of this paper is to explore the applicability of clock gating techniques to binary counters in order to reduce the power consumption as well as the switching noise generation. A measurement methodology to establish right comparisons between different implementations of gateclocked counters is presented. Basically two ways of applying clock gating are considered: clock gating on independent bits and clock gating on groups of bits. The right selection of bits where clock gating must be applied and the suited composition of groups of bits is essential when applying this technique. We have found groupment of bits is the best option when applying clock gating to reduce power consumption and specially to reduce noise generation.

One of the best methods to improve the security of cryptographic systems used to exchange sensitive information is to attack them to find their vulnerabilities and to strengthen them in subsequent designs. Trivium stream cipher is one of the lightweight ciphers designed for security applications in the Internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we present a complete setup to attack ASIC implementations of Trivium which allows recovering the secret keys using the active non-invasive technique attack of clock manipulation, combined with Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) cryptanalysis. The attack system is able to inject effective transient faults into the Trivium in a clock cycle and sample the faulty output. Then, the internal state of the Trivium is recovered using the DFA cryptanalysis through the comparison between the correct and the faulty outputs. Finally, a backward version of Trivium was also designed to go back and get the secret keys from the initial internal states. The key ...

The best way to learn how to design digital systems at the RT level is to use practical examples. In addition, from a teaching point of view, the more practical they are, the more attractive to students. But for a design to be attractive, even if it is presented with a low complexity, it is not possible to do it in a single practice session. This paper presents, as a demonstrator, the design at RT level and its implementation in FPGA of a digital system that uses the Trivium flow cipher and on which measurements of maximum operating frequency are made. This circuit is designed in three laboratory sessions of about two hours each.

The fault injection in ciphers operation is a very successful mechanism to attack them. The inclusion of elements of protection against this kind of attacks is more and more necessary. These mechanisms are usually based on introducing redundancy, which leads to a greater consumption of resources or a longer processing time. This article presents how the introduction of placement restrictions on ciphers can make it difficult to inject faults by altering the clock signal. It is therefore a countermeasure that neither increases the consumption of resources nor the processing time. This mechanism has been tested on FPGA implementations of the Trivium cipher. Several tests have been performed on a Spartan 3E device from Xilinx and the experimental measurements have been carried out with ChipScope Pro. The tests showed that an adequate floorplanning is a good countermeasure against these kind of attacks.

Digital design learning at the RT level requires practical examples and as learning progresses, the examples need to become more complex. FPGAs and development boards offer a very suitable platform for the implementation of these designs. However, classroom practice sessions usually last two hours, which does not allow the complexity of the designs be high enough. For this reason, interesting designs that can be made in several sessions are required In this paper, the construction of a distance measuring system is presented as a demonstrator. For this purpose, a distance measurement module based on ultrasound is available and the results are displayed in 7-segment displays on a Nexys4 board.

The learning of digital design at the RT level by the students improves with practical work, which can be developed in teams, allow both the gradual advance of complexity as the learning progresses, and the proposal to be attractive to them, such as playing simple games. FPGAs and development boards offer a very suitable platform for the implementation of these designs. This paper presents a work in the Advanced Digital Design course (4th year of the Degree) consisting of the construction of a slightly adapted version of the game "Simon Says" in which the player must memorize a sequence that becomes more difficult for as levels pass. The work, which occupies the second half of the semester, is carried out by teams of three students and must have a demonstrator implemented on a Digilent Nexys4-DDR board.

Muchos sistemas electrónicos incorporan dispositivos criptográficos que implementan algoritmos que cifran la información almacenada. Pero aun cuando los algoritmos sean muy seguros, estos dispositivos pueden llegar a revelar cierta información debido a su implementación física, mediante el empleo de los llamados ataques laterales. Estos ataques hacen uso de información obtenida durante del funcionamiento del circuito para obtener información sobre la clave utilizada. Por lo tanto, hay que cuidar la implementación física de los dispositivos criptográficos, para minimizar la posibilidad de pérdida de información mediante estos ataques. En nuestras líneas de investigación estamos trabajando en analizar la vulnerabilidad de implementaciones de circuitos criptográficos, fundamentalmente cifradores de clave privada, frente a ataques laterales pasivos y activos. Estos ataques obtienen información de la clave almacenada mediante la medida de magnitudes físicas como el consumo de potencia o ...

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