On the Delay Required to Realize Boolean Functions

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryJoint Services Electronics Program / DAAB-07-67-C-0199National Science Foundation / GK-2339 and GP-742

Excitability in autonomous Boolean networks

We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that excitable systems can be built with autonomous Boolean networks. Their experimental implementation is realized with asynchronous logic gates on a reconfigurabe chip. When these excitable systems are assembled into time-delay networks, their dynamics display nanosecond time-scale spike synchronization patterns that are controllable in period and phase.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted in Europhysics Letters (epljournal.edpsciences.org

All-optical logic circuits based on polarization properties of nondegenerate four-wave mixing

All-optical logic circuits based on the polarization properties of nondegenerate four-wave mixing are proposed. Schemes to perform multiple triple-product logic functions are discussed, and it is shown that higher-level Boolean operations that involve several bits can be implemented without resorting to the standard two-input gates. As a simple illustration of the idea, a circuit that performs error correction on a (3, 1) Hamming code is demonstrated. Error-free performance (bit error rate of <10^(−9)) at 2.5 Gbit/s is achieved after single-error correction on the Hamming word with 50% errors

Advancing Hardware Security Using Polymorphic and Stochastic Spin-Hall Effect Devices

Protecting intellectual property (IP) in electronic circuits has become a serious challenge in recent years. Logic locking/encryption and layout camouflaging are two prominent techniques for IP protection. Most existing approaches, however, particularly those focused on CMOS integration, incur excessive design overheads resulting from their need for additional circuit structures or device-level modifications. This work leverages the innate polymorphism of an emerging spin-based device, called the giant spin-Hall effect (GSHE) switch, to simultaneously enable locking and camouflaging within a single instance. Using the GSHE switch, we propose a powerful primitive that enables cloaking all the 16 Boolean functions possible for two inputs. We conduct a comprehensive study using state-of-the-art Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks to demonstrate the superior resilience of the proposed primitive in comparison to several others in the literature. While we tailor the primitive for deterministic computation, it can readily support stochastic computation; we argue that stochastic behavior can break most, if not all, existing SAT attacks. Finally, we discuss the resilience of the primitive against various side-channel attacks as well as invasive monitoring at runtime, which are arguably even more concerning threats than SAT attacks.Comment: Published in Proc. Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 201