Effect of Hardware Trojans on a Low Power and Area Efficient Max-log-MAP Decoder

In the modern world of wireless communication, power efficient and hardware secure turbo decoders are preferred. Malicious Trojans, injected during the design or fabrication of integrated circuits for communication cause unwanted behavior in the system. MAP decoders form the component decoders of iterative turbo decoding process. A simplified version of the MAP algorithm is the Max-log-MAP algorithm that has a lower computational complexity, without much degradation in the performance. This paper deals with the implementation of a low power and area efficient Max-log-MAP decoder and studies the effect of a proposed Trojan model on the decoder. It is seen that there is a steady performance degradation at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) regions and a rapid degradation at high SNR region.