Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA - USA

Visiting Professor
Integrated Systems Laboratory
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
Webpage

Variability Models and Sensors with Impacts on Hardware Security

I will describe two research thrusts:
1) On-Chip Variability Sensors: Variations in process, environment and workloads have become a major challenge in the design of robust computing systems.  Fortunately, lightweight on-chip sensors can monitor many of these variations in real-time and feed control systems and software at higher levels.  The cooperation of different types of sensors within and between cores, along with information at software layers can be used to mitigate or at least predict many effects of variation.  (Funded by Intel and SRC)
 
2) Impacts of Variability on Hardware Security: Hardware security lies at the foundation of all higher level secure systems.  Variability introduces both challenges and opportunities in the design of security primitives as well as the feasibility of various physical attacks. (Funded by NSF, SRC, Cisco and Cryptography Research)

About the speaker:
Wayne Burleson is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he has been since 1990. He has degrees from MIT and the University of Colorado and has worked as a design engineer and consultant in the semiconductor industry. Wayne collaborates extensively in Europe and is currently visiting at EPFL. His research is in the general area of VLSI, including circuits and CAD for low-power, long interconnects, clocking and mixed signals, on-chip sensor, reliability, thermal effects, process variation and noise mitigation.  He also conducts research in hardware security, secure systems, signal processing and multimedia instructional technology.  Wayne has published over 150-refereed publications in these areas and is a member of the ACM, ASEE, Sigma Xi, and a Fellow of the IEEE.