On-Chip Current Sensors for Reliable, Secure, and Low-Power Integrated Circuits

Many types of new-generation electronics systems surround nowadays our lives, providing solutions, utilities, and conveniences we had never experimented before.
Biomedical, agricultural, industrial, commercial, service, entertainment, home, automobile, aeronautical, space, and telecommunication appliances help us to solve quotidian problems related, for instance, to the health of living beings, transport over short and long distances, satellite TV broadcast, weather forecast, and communication between computers and people [181]. In this context in which billions of electronics and devices harvest data from tens of billions of sensors, dealing with reliability, security, and power issues becomes more and more important for integrated circuit (IC) system applications.
In the advent of self-adaptive systems like geolocation satellites, aircraft, drones, autonomous cars, nuclear power plant robots, and in-body-implanted medical devices—which are all applications of high risk in case of failure—embedded ICs must be sufficiently reliable, safely operating within a specified range of low power performance even in harsh environments. Furthermore, ICs embedded in such safety-critical applications must also be conveniently secure, hiding confidential data, restricting access to private information, and defending themselves from intentional attacks that aim to hack into systems for maliciously carrying out illegal actions or inducing catastrophic situations.
This book is specifically interested to deal with three important issues related to the reliability, security, and power of integrated circuit (IC) systems in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies: