Emerging Technology-Based Design of Primitives for Hardware Security

Hardware security concerns such as intellectual property (IP) piracy and hardware Trojans have triggered research into circuit protection and malicious logic detection from various design perspectives. In this article, emerging technologies are investigated by leveraging their unique properties for applications in the hardware security domain. Security, for the first time, will be treated as one design metric for emerging nano-architecture. Five example circuit structures including camouflaging gates, polymorphic gates, current/voltage-based circuit protectors, and current-based XOR logic are designed to show the high efficiency of silicon nanowire FETs and graphene SymFET in applications such as circuit protection and IP piracy prevention. Simulation results indicate that highly efficient and secure circuit structures can be achieved via the use of non-CMOS devices.