On Mitigation of Side-Channel Attacks in 3D ICs: Decorrelating Thermal Patterns from Power and Activity

Various side-channel attacks (SCAs) on ICs have been successfully demonstrated and also mitigated to some degree. In the context of 3D ICs, however, prior art has mainly focused on efficient implementations of classical SCA countermeasures. That is, SCAs tailored for up-and-coming 3D ICs have been overlooked so far. In this paper, we conduct such a novel study and focus on one of the most accessible and critical side channels: thermal leakage of activity and power patterns. We address the thermal leakage in 3D ICs early on during floorplanning, along with tailored extensions for power and thermal management. Our key idea is to carefully exploit the specifics of material and structural properties in 3D ICs, thereby decorrelating the thermal behaviour from underlying power and activity patterns. Most importantly, we discuss powerful SCAs and demonstrate how our open-source tool helps to mitigate them.Comment: Published in Proc. Design Automation Conference, 201

AC coil, reactor and cable demonstrations of low AC loss elementary and assembled BSCCO conductors.

International audienceA European consortium has progressed towards AC coil, transformer and cable applications made of low AC loss Bi-2223 conductors. Internally assembled ring-bundle-barrier conductors were used in AC coils and an externally assembled conductor was realized for transformer and reactor windings. For the design and optimization of HTS AC coils, a numerical tool for the prediction of AC losses in coils and coil sets had been developed. The demonstrations with air-core coils and iron-core reactors showed that the numerical tool can already be confidently used in the design and optimization of HTS AC coils at nominal operation conditions. A series of three power cable prototypes was manufactured to estimate the influence of optimized low AC loss tapes on the total losses of a cable. In order to estimate the impact of the twist pitch on the losses we also manufactured cables with short and long twist pitches. The advantages and drawbacks of low AC loss tapes in power applications are discussed on the grounds of the test results