Figure of merits of 28nm Si technologies for implementing laser attack resistant security dedicated circuits

Abstract : Among all means to attack a security dedicated circuit, fault injection by means of laser illumination is a very efficient one. The laser beam creates electrons/holes pairs along its way through the silicon. The collection of these charges creates a transient current and thus may induce a fault in the circuit. Nevertheless the collection efficiency depends on various parameters including the technology used to implement the circuit. Here, up-to-date Bulk and Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FD-SOI) 28nm technologies are compared in terms of sensitivity against laser injection. It comes out that FD-SOI structures show less sensitivity to laser injection and thus should be further explored for security dedicated circuits implementations.