This paper introduces an approach of extracting process variations inside System-on-Chips (SoCs) to derive a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). The process variations are extracted from the architecture of a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC). The DAC consists of two independent resistive ladders to provide one single or two output voltages. The resistive ladder is characterized by the SoC with the on-chip Analogto-Digital Converter (ADC) module. The developed PUF concept that exploits the process variations of the DAC is described and evaluated in this work. Due to the concept of not accepting an input challenge to the PUF, we designed a so-called weak-PUF. The final generated PUF response or also called fingerprint has a total length of 652 bits when using the maximum number of possible positions. In a typical operation condition, a worst-case intra-Hamming Distance (HD) of approximately 5% is achieved. Over a wide temperature range of -10°C to 70°C the intra-HD is increased to 13% in the worst-case. The inter-HD for all observed operating conditions is approximately 46%.

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In recent years, personalized healthcare has become increasingly popular in our society. Wearable devices started a trend for monitoring physical health parameters. The next evolution after wearable devices are Point-Of-Care (POC) devices, which provide more vital parameter analyses for everyone. The electrification of POC devices is required to simplify the process and to increase the accuracy of measurement results. In this work, we focus on POC devices in combination with smartphones. Often, these devices are measuring and processing very sensitive data, which underlie a high privacy restriction. Therefore, it is required to provide an architecture and security issue analysis of POC devices. The outcome of this research contribution provides a sensitization for the requirement of enhanced security features. Especially, to fulfill the need for a power-aware security concept for a POC system architecture, which underlies limited resources like power consumption.

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