TMR: A Solution for Hardware Security Designs

Cyber-security has become an increasingly important issue in today's integrated circuit designs. The use of commercial off-the-shelf products and design outsourcing have introduced uncertainty in the supply chain and posed security threats such as an inside attacks. This paper describes the implementation of an FPGA design based on soft-core processor, and how triple modular redundancy (TMR) is applied to mitigate against the attacks in the supply chain. Four different applications are implemented and used as test cases for the TMR design. This paper also discusses the overhead of applying TMR, and the importance of adding diversity in redundancy.

Li, Yubo, and Kevin Skadron. "TMR: A Solution for Hardware Security Designs." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (2015).