Low-cost security aware HLS methodology

Owing to massive complexity of modern digital integrated circuits (ICs) disabling complete in-house development, globalisation of the design process establishes itself as an inevitable solution for faster and efficient design. However, globalisation incurs importing intellectual property (IP) cores from various third party vendors, rendering an IP susceptible to hardware threats. To provide trust and security in digital ICs within user constraints, design of a low-cost optimised dual modular redundant, through Trojan secured high-level synthesis (HLS) methodology, is crucial. This study presents exploration of a low-cost optimised HLS solution capable of handling hardware Trojan (providing security) that alters computational output. The key contributions of the study are as: (i) novel low-cost security-aware HLS approach; (ii) novel encoding for representing bacterium in the design space (comprising of candidate datapath resource configuration and vendor allocation information for Trojan secured solution); and (iii) novel exploration process of an efficient vendor allocation procedure that assists in yielding a low-cost Trojan secured schedule. Experimental results indicate significant reduction in the cost of security-aware HLS solution (82.4%) through the proposed approach compared with a recent approach.