A power side-channel-based digital to analog converterfor Xilinx FPGAs

Abstract

A novel Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) modulates the overall power consumption of an FPGA by disabling/enabling short circuits programmed into the interconnect. The power pin of the FPGA serves as the output of the DAC. The DAC achieves high linearity and can be used to implement applications in communications, security, etc. The shortcircuit-based DAC consumes 1/3 the area of an alternative shift-register-based DAC that is presented for the sake of comparison.