Reliability and Security Challenges in Electrical/Optical On-Chip Interconnects for IoT Applications

Abstract

The evolution of internet of things (IoT) applications, cloud computing, smart cities, and 4G/5G wireless communication systems have significantly increased the demands for on chip processing. Network on chip (NoC) is a viable alternative that can provide higher processing and bandwidth for increasing demands. NoC offers better performance and more flexibility with lower communication latency and higher throughput. However, use of NoC-based IoT devices have raised concerns on security and reliability of integrated chips (IC), which is used in almost every application. IoT devices share data that becomes vulnerable to attack and can be compromised during the data transfer. Keeping in view these security challenges, a detailed survey is presented that covers the security issues and challenges focusing on NoCs along with proposed countermeasures to secure on-chip communication. This study includes on-chip security issues for electrical as well as optical on-chip interconnects.