Engineering topics

Bhunia, Swarup

Publications and source records attributed to Bhunia, Swarup.

5 records

DOE OSTI2024

Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance for Substance Detection

This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy for substance detection, highlighting its principles, methodologies, and applications. The paper elucidates the fundamental physics underlying NQR spectroscopy, emphasizing the interaction between nuclear quadrupole moments and electric field gradients. It explores the various experimental techniques and instrumentation developments that have enabled the sensitive detection and precise characterization of substances containing quadrupolar nuclei. A significant portion of the survey is dedicated to discussing the diverse applications of NQR spectroscopy, including the detection of explosives, drug pharmaceuticals, and material authentication. Furthermore, the survey examines the challenges and limitations associated with NQR spectroscopy, including issues related to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), temperature dependency, and substance restrictions. Strategies to overcome these challenges are discussed, offering insights into the future directions of NQR spectroscopy research that includes artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) integration, incorporating a cloud database for NQR parameter storage, and multi-modal analysis.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DOE OSTI2024

PRISTINE: An Emulation Platform for PCB-Level Hardware Trojans

Printed circuit Boards (PCBs) are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious design alteration, also known as Trojan attacks, due to a distributed business model that often involves various untrusted parties. Such attacks can be mounted at various stages in the PCB life cycle. The relative ease of alteration of PCB hardware even after fabrication (due to physical access to surface-mounted critical components and traces) makes them attractive for an adversary to manipulate their functional/physical behavior for malicious intent. There is a growing need to explore viable Trojan attacks in a PCB, analyze their functional and physical characteristics (e.g., impact on power or delay), and study the effectiveness of countermeasures against these attacks. While simulation-based approaches for PCB Trojan insertion are effective at creating a large population of possible Trojans, they fail to provide functional feasibility analysis with a realistic workload for a trigger circuit. Also, they cannot estimate a Trojan’s side-channel footprint due to the unavailability of physical models of diverse PCB components. To address these deficiencies, in this paper, we present PRISTINE, a PCB-level emulation system for any integrity or physical tampering issues, specifically, hardware Trojan insertion. The need for building such an emulation platform to resolve PCB trust issues in the supply chain is also surveyed and discussed. Both custom Hardware Hacking (HaHa) boards and multiple commercial PCBs are then used to test the ability of the proposed system to emulate various hardware Trojans specially designed to exploit board-specific hardware characteristics. Experimental results on emulated board-level Trojans show that a wide range of Trojans can be successfully activated, thus enabling the expected payload effects on both types of boards to be studied and quantified. The resulting data are further analyzed to create PCB-level Trojan benchmarks. In particular, a comparative evaluation of the experimental results is used to propose a risk level metric that quantifies the probability of detection and degree of payload impact of each Trojan on a given commercial PCB.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2023

On-Chip Batteries as Distributed Energy Sources in Heterogeneous 2.5D/3D Integrated Circuits

Energy efficiency in digital systems faces challenges due to the constraints imposed by small-scale transistors. Moreover, the growing demand for portable consumer electronics necessitates the use of compact energy sources. To address these challenges, heterogeneous 3D IC technology has emerged as a promising solution for the former. Regarding the latter, we propose the concept of distributed batteries within a heterogeneous 3D IC. This approach involves utilizing multiple smaller batteries with different specifications among different modules of 3D ICs. This approach optimizes performance and overcomes limitations associated with both 3D ICs and conventional power delivery methods. Distributed batteries play a vital role in effectively managing the heat generated by energy sources and modules within a 3D IC. Furthermore, they contribute to achieving a uniform distribution of heat throughout the entire structure, which ultimately ensures the optimal performance of the batteries and modules. The simulation results indicate a 40 percent enhancement in achieving a more even distribution of generated heat. Additionally, the proposed distributed battery techniques improve power delivery, enhance reliability, and enable optimized voltage regulation while improving efficiency. In addition to the primary benefits, alternative configurations of the proposed approach can offer extra energy storage capacity and act as efficient electromagnetic shields, resulting in an impressive reduction of external electromagnetic noises by 60 dB.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Contact-Less Integrity Verification of Microelectronics Using Near-Field EM Analysis

Modern microelectronics life-cycle and supply chain ecosystem bring multiple untrusted entities, which can compromise their integrity. A major integrity issue of microelectronics stems from piracy of intellectual properties (IP) and counterfeiting, which causes significant revenue loss to the semiconductor manufacturers. Further, these components often lead to compromised functionality, reliability, security, and safety of an electronic system. This paper presents secure information transmission and probing methods for verifying the integrity of digital integrated circuit (ICs) based on their electromagnetic (EM) near-field emissions and thereby protecting systems against counterfeit components. The proposed method has been tested on both high-level instructions executed by microprocessors or Systems-on-Chip (serving as examples of software), and also logic circuits within FPGA fabrics and ASICs (serving as examples of hardware). The authentication information required by each digital system is generated using a pseudo-random number generator circuit and securely transmitted via near-field magnetic emissions. The authorized party can probe these emissions using a near-field probe, process the acquired signals to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and then recover the secure information through matched filtering. Experimental results from commercial SoCs are used to demonstrate the proposed technique. Methods for reducing EM interference during integrity verification of both FPGAs and ASICs are also described.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Non-invasive authentication of mail packages using nuclear quadrupole resonance spectroscopy

The international postal network is one of the most widely used methods for correspondence throughout the world. Most postal traffic across the globe consists of legitimate interpersonal, business-consumer, and business-business communications. However, the global postal system is also utilized for criminal activity. In particular, it is often utilized to ship and distribute contraband, including illegal psychoactive drugs such as fentanyl and heroin, to consumers. Existing technological solutions are capable of identifying synthetic opioids and other illegal drugs within packages, but are accompanied by several disadvantages that make them unsuitable for large-scale authentication of international mail traffic. This paper presents a novel method for non-invasive authentication of mail packages that overcomes these challenges. The approach uses nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy to detect and quantify the presence of known active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) within the package. It has been experimentally demonstrated using a bench top prototype. Test results from a variety of package types demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed authentication approach.

42 ENGINEERING↗