CW Pro: Usage scenario of low/high pass filters

Hello together,

first of all: Congratulations for releasing the new ChipWhisperer Pro!
It really comes with a lot of nifty new features.

Additionally it ships with extra low- and high pass filters.

What’s the planned usage scenario for those?

Do they make power analysis a bit cleaner?
Also, when would you use which filter?

Best regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

We’re also really happy about the Pro release!

The high pass filter is good for removing low-frequency noise. The most common example of this would be a switch-mode power supply, which usually runs at 50-500 kHz - hence the 500 kHz HPF. The low pass is good for cutting out high-frequency spikes. For example, if your target has other peripherals occasionally running, the LPF might help to cut these out. The LPF is also particularly useful for fast hardware crypto (especially because the ChipWhisperer is synchronous). For example, when every AES round is only 1 clock cycle, it’s hard to use a digital filter to clean up 4 ADC samples - this needs to be done in hardware.

Thanks for the explanation!

So those filters are indeed good to have and would also be a neat extra accessory for the CW-lite.