Modeling of Thermal Coupling and Temperature Sensor Circuit Design Considerations for Hardware Trojan Detection

This paper describes the development of a model for the simulation of electrothermal coupling to detect malicious circuits with on-chip temperature sensors. The strategy is presented using the layout of a digital control logic block from an 8-bit conventional successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). A differential temperature sensor with a high sensitivity of 2.1 V/degrees C was designed with 130 nm CMOS technology. Joint simulation results of the circuit under test and temperature sensor indicate the potential for temperature-based hardware Trojan (HT) detection with on-chip resources.