Low-power Architectures for Mobile Systems

The starting point for the activities in the MAIS project, concerning hardware architectures, might be summarized as follows: extract the most relevant and characteristic requirements on and the challenges to the hardware architecture presented by the MAIS applications, and perform an exploration of the architectural design space (at the level of both the individual processing nodes in a network and of the network itself), so as to optimize some particularly relevant figure of merit. Specifically, we take into account the performance, power consumption and robustness of security-oriented modules. This allows us to propose flexible solutions for CPU architectures, whose configuration can be exploited best at run time by the intrinsic characteristics of the applications, and to derive power models and frameworks, both at CPU and at protocol level, so as to model and subsequently optimize the power consumption locally and at network level. In particular, security is analyzed from the standpoint of side-channel attacks, exploring DFA attacks and examining the effectiveness and cost of a few proposed countermeasures.