117 research outputs found
Dependability investigation of wireless short range embedded systems: hardware platform oriented approach
A new direction in short-range wireless applications has appeared in the form of high-speed data communication devices for distances of hundreds meters. Behind these embedded applications, a complex heterogeneous architecture is built. Moreover, these short range communications are introduced into critical applications, where the dependability/reliability is mandatory. Thus, dependability concerns around reliability evaluation become a major challenge in these systems, and pose several questions to answer. Obviously, in such systems, the attribute reliability has to be investigated for various components and at different abstraction levels. In this paper, we discuss the investigation of dependability in wireless short range systems. We present a hardware platform for wireless system dependability analysis as an alternative for the time consuming simulation techniques. The platform is built using several instances of one of the commercial FPGA platforms available on the market place. We describe the different steps of building the wireless hardware platform for short range systems dependability analysis. Then, we show how this HW platform based dependability investigation framework can be a very interactive approach. Based on this platform we introduce a new methodology and a flow to investigate the different parts of system dependability at different abstraction levels. The benefits to use the proposed framework are three fold: first, it takes care of the whole system (HW/SW -digital part, mixed RF part, and wireless part); Second, the hardware platform enables to explore the applicationâs reliability under real environmental conditions taking into account the effect of the environment threats on the system; And last, the wireless platform built for dependability investigation present a fast investigation approach in comparison with the time consuming co-simulation technique
Security of Electrical, Optical and Wireless On-Chip Interconnects: A Survey
The advancement of manufacturing technologies has enabled the integration of
more intellectual property (IP) cores on the same system-on-chip (SoC).
Scalable and high throughput on-chip communication architecture has become a
vital component in today's SoCs. Diverse technologies such as electrical,
wireless, optical, and hybrid are available for on-chip communication with
different architectures supporting them. Security of the on-chip communication
is crucial because exploiting any vulnerability would be a goldmine for an
attacker. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of threat models,
attacks, and countermeasures over diverse on-chip communication technologies as
well as sophisticated architectures.Comment: 41 pages, 24 figures, 4 table
A Security-aware and LUT-based CAD Flow for the Physical Synthesis of eASICs
Numerous threats are associated with the globalized integrated circuit (IC)
supply chain, such as piracy, reverse engineering, overproduction, and
malicious logic insertion. Many obfuscation approaches have been proposed to
mitigate these threats by preventing an adversary from fully understanding the
IC (or parts of it). The use of reconfigurable elements inside an IC is a known
obfuscation technique, either as a coarse grain reconfigurable block (i.e.,
eFPGA) or as a fine grain element (i.e., FPGA-like look-up tables). This paper
presents a security-aware CAD flow that is LUT-based yet still compatible with
the standard cell based physical synthesis flow. More precisely, our CAD flow
explores the FPGA-ASIC design space and produces heavily obfuscated designs
where only small portions of the logic resemble an ASIC. Therefore, we term
this specialized solution an "embedded ASIC" (eASIC). Nevertheless, even for
heavily LUT-dominated designs, our proposed decomposition and pin swapping
algorithms allow for performance gains that enable performance levels that only
ASICs would otherwise achieve. On the security side, we have developed novel
template-based attacks and also applied existing attacks, both oracle-free and
oracle-based. Our security analysis revealed that the obfuscation rate for an
SHA-256 study case should be at least 45% for withstanding traditional attacks
and at least 80% for withstanding template-based attacks. When the 80\%
obfuscated SHA-256 design is physically implemented, it achieves a remarkable
frequency of 368MHz in a 65nm commercial technology, whereas its FPGA
implementation (in a superior technology) achieves only 77MHz
Dynamic partial reconfiguration management for high performance and reliability in FPGAs
Modern Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are no longer used to implement
small âglue logicâ circuitries. The high-density of reconfigurable logic resources in
todayâs FPGAs enable the implementation of large systems in a single chip. FPGAs
are highly flexible devices; their functionality can be altered by simply loading a new
binary file in their configuration memory. While the flexibility of FPGAs is
comparable to General-Purpose Processors (GPPs), in the sense that different
functions can be performed using the same hardware, the performance gain that can
be achieved using FPGAs can be orders of magnitudes higher as FPGAs offer the
ability for customisation of parallel computational architectures.
Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) allows for changing the functionality of
certain blocks on the chip while the rest of the FPGA is operational. DPR has
sparked the interest of researchers to explore new computational platforms where
computational tasks are off-loaded from a main CPU to be executed using dedicated
reconfigurable hardware accelerators configured on demand at run-time. By having a
battery of custom accelerators which can be swapped in and out of the FPGA at runtime,
a higher computational density can be achieved compared to static systems
where the accelerators are bound to fixed locations within the chip. Furthermore, the
ability of relocating these accelerators across several locations on the chip allows for
the implementation of adaptive systems which can mitigate emerging faults in the
FPGA chip when operating in harsh environments. By porting the appropriate fault
mitigation techniques in such computational platforms, the advantages of FPGAs can
be harnessed in different applications in space and military electronics where FPGAs
are usually seen as unreliable devices due to their sensitivity to radiation and extreme
environmental conditions.
In light of the above, this thesis investigates the deployment of DPR as: 1) a method
for enhancing performance by efficient exploitation of the FPGA resources, and 2) a
method for enhancing the reliability of systems intended to operate in harsh
environments. Achieving optimal performance in such systems requires an efficient
internal configuration management system to manage the reconfiguration and
execution of the reconfigurable modules in the FPGA. In addition, the system needs
to support âfault-resilienceâ features by integrating parameterisable fault detection
and recovery capabilities to meet the reliability standard of fault-tolerant
applications. This thesis addresses all the design and implementation aspects of an
Internal Configuration Manger (ICM) which supports a novel bitstream relocation
model to enable the placement of relocatable accelerators across several locations on
the FPGA chip. In addition to supporting all the configuration capabilities required to
implement a Reconfigurable Operating System (ROS), the proposed ICM also
supports the novel multiple-clone configuration technique which allows for cloning
several instances of the same hardware accelerator at the same time resulting in much
shorter configuration time compared to traditional configuration techniques. A faulttolerant
(FT) version of the proposed ICM which supports a comprehensive faultrecovery
scheme is also introduced in this thesis. The proposed FT-ICM is designed
with a much smaller area footprint compared to Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR)
hardening techniques while keeping a comparable level of fault-resilience.
The capabilities of the proposed ICM system are demonstrated with two novel
applications. The first application demonstrates a proof-of-concept reliable FPGA
server solution used for executing encryption/decryption queries. The proposed
server deploys bitstream relocation and modular redundancy to mitigate both
permanent and transient faults in the device. It also deploys a novel Built-In Self-
Test (BIST) diagnosis scheme, specifically designed to detect emerging permanent
faults in the system at run-time. The second application is a data mining application
where DPR is used to increase the computational density of a system used to
implement the Frequent Itemset Mining (FIM) problem
Recent Topics in Electromagnetic Compatibility
Recent Topics in Electromagnetic Compatability discusses several topics in electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electromagnetic interference (EMI), including measurements, shielding, emission, interference, biomedical devices, and numerical modeling. Over five sections, chapters address the electromagnetic spectrum of corona discharge, life cycle assessment of flexible electromagnetic shields, EMC requirements for implantable medical devices, analysis and design of absorbers for EMC applications, artificial surfaces, and media for EMC and EMI shielding, and much more
- âŠ