Side-channel attacks have become a significant threat to the integrated circuit security. Circuit level techniques are proposed in this paper as a countermeasure against side-channel attacks. A distributed on-chip power delivery system consisting of multi-level switched capacitor (SC) voltage converters is proposed where the individual interleaved stages are turned on and turned off either based on the workload information or pseudo-randomly to scramble the power consumption profile. In the case that the changes in the workload demand do not trigger the power delivery system to turn on or off individual stages, the active stages are reshuffled with so called converter-reshuffling to insert random spikes in the power consumption profile. An entropy based metric is developed to evaluate the security-performance of the proposed converter-reshuffling technique as compared to three other existing on-chip power delivery schemes. The increase in the power trace entropy with CoRe scheme is also demonstrated with simulation results to further verify the theoretical analysis.

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One of the primary challenges with fully integrated voltage regulation is to maintain a high power efficiency over a wide output current range. A multiphase distributed switched capacitor (SC) converter with a new control method that adaptively turns on and off certain interleaved stages is proposed. By controlling the number of active interleaved stages based on the load current, the proposed system achieves a higher power efficiency for lower output currents, forcing active stages to operate at highest possible power efficiency. By distributing the interleaved stages, lower IR and Ldi/dt drop is achieved.