Design and test of a low-power 90nm XOR/XNOR gate for cryptographic applications

In this paper, the design of a XOR/XNOR gate for low-power cryptographic applications is presented. The proposed gate optimizes the SABL (Sense Amplifier Based Logic) gate, widely used in cryptocircuit implementations, by removing residual charge in the pull-down circuit and simplifying the pull-up. The resulting gate improves SABL in terms of area, power consumption, propagation delay and resilience against Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attacks. To demonstrate the gain in performances, both gates have been designed, physically implemented and experimentally characterized, in a 90nm TSMC technology. Experimental results show a reduction of 15% in area, 12% in power consumption, and 40% in delay in the proposed gate. To demonstrate the gain in security of the proposal, simulation-based DPA attacks have been performed on respective Kasumi Sbox9 implementations, being our proposal suitable for inmediate application in high-performance secure cryptographic applications.