Expanding the Analog Mandate: What It Can Compute and What It Can Conceal

Abstract

Analog and mixed-signal circuits have outgrown the abstractions used to specify, verify, and trust them. Physical dynamics beyond these abstractions can be deliberately harnessed for computation or adversarially exploited to conceal malicious behavior. Our time-domain neuromorphic architectures encode computation in signal delay rather than amplitude, eliminate data converters from the compute path, and are implemented in 55-nm CMOS. Device-circuit co-design converts non-equilibrium ionic dynamics in ECRAM, ordinarily treated as undesirable, into local short-term plasticity, enabling implicit temporal filtering without network-level control. In security, this same gap becomes an attack surface. We experimentally validate two attacks in 55-nm silicon: one embeds deterministic patterns within an ADC's effective noise envelope to activate digital payloads; the other modulates input-referred offset to exfiltrate data through a nominally input-only biosensor interface. Together, these results establish analog dynamics as both a resource to harness and a security boundary to defend.

Bio

Teju Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology and Director of the RF/Analog/Mixed-Signal Laboratory (RAMLab). Before joining academia, he spent 15 years in the semiconductor industry, leading technology and product development for high-volume analog and mixed-signal ICs in sensing and audio applications, with cumulative shipments exceeding 600 million units. He holds more than 180 U.S. and international patents. His research spans analog hardware security, time-domain neuromorphic computing with emerging devices, and low-power biosensing circuits. He received his Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from RIT, and his work has been recognized with two IEEE best-paper awards. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee, and Vice Program Chair of the IEEE Microelectronics Design & Test Symposium.