Side-Channel Attack Resilient RHBD 12T SRAM Cell for Secure Nuclear Environment

Abstract

Extremely energetic particles in the nuclear environment make memory cells prone to soft errors. Also, attackers extract secret data of SRAM cells via side-channel attacks (SCAs), and leakage power analysis attacks (LPAs) seriously threaten security systems. This paper indicates a highly effective radiation-hardened and LPA-resilient (RHLR12T) SRAM cell that is both radiation-resistant by design and LPA-resilient for nuclear applications. It offers better speed, enhanced writing stability and higher overlap percentage than other considered SRAM cells, such as 6T, Quatro, We-Quatro, and RHMD10T, utilising United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) 45nm CMOS technology at the supply voltage of 1.0V and $27\mathrm {^{\circ }}\text{C}$ operating temperature. The proposed cell gives $1.141\mathrm {\times }$ higher write stability, $1.55\mathrm {\times }$ lower write access time, $1.11\mathrm {\times }$ increased critical charge and $1.51\mathrm {\times }$ better overlap percentage than the RHMD10T SRAM cell.