MSc thesis project proposal

Specification, optimization and realization of complex compute blocks

These type of projects target a FPGA/VLSI implementation of complex compute blocks. For example: 1) Biometrics is the area of knowledge comprising the methods for unique human recognition, based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioural traits. The term has its origin in the ancient Greek language (bios ="life" plus metron ="measure"). Among all the biometric techniques, some of them of recent development, fingerprinting has been the most widely used during the 20th Century. The maturity of this biometric technique and, mainly, the dramatic improvement of the capture devices have lead to the proposal of fingerprinting in multiple applications. The objective of the system is to decide whether an input fingerprint belongs to the same individual than a previously stored one. This procedure is called verification, in contrast with identification, that tries to decide which fingerprint in a database shows higher resemblances with an input one. 2)Cryptographic devices are vulnerable to so-called Side Channel At- tacks. As attackers become smarter, hardware designers and chip manufacturers need to keep up with the security demands against these Side Channel Attacks. Side Channel Attacks such as timing analysis, power consumption analysis or electromagnetic analysis, are based upon the principle that the attacker observes the behavior of the side channel (power, electromagnetic emission etc.) while a cryp- tographic device is performing its operations. The side channel re- veals the attacker valuable information about the secret key which ultimately enables the attacker to derive the secret key. There are several counter measures possible that minimize the side channel information.

Requirements

VHDL or SystemC. Domain knowledge

Contact

dr.ir. René van Leuken

Signal Processing Systems Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2021-12-06