On-chip current flattening circuit with dynamic voltage scaling

This paper presents the circuit-level implementation for a current flattening system designed to control the power-supply current and to protect cryptosystems from power analysis attacks. When required, the proposed circuit dynamically controls the power consumption by injecting an extra current and by scaling the power-supply voltage. The circuit can be integrated on the same chip with a cryptographic processor. In this way the power-supply current has little meaningful information for a side-channel attack. The proposed circuit has been designed in a 0.18 mum CMOS technology and operates with a nominal 1.8-V power supply