High-level design of a novel PUF based on RTN

Abstract

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as an alternative to traditional Non-Volatile Memories in the field of lightweight hardware security. Recently, a novel PUF has been presented that uses the Random Telegraph Noise (RTN) phenomenon as the underlying source of entropy. While, in general, the nature of that entropy source largely dictates the quality of a PUF, little attention is often paid, however, to how the PUF architecture and its building blocks impact the PUF quality. This paper addresses the high-level design of the novel PUF to ascertain the extent of that impact and refine the building blocks specifications to mitigate it. Using high-level numerical and mixed-signal electrical simulations, the results demonstrate that it is very important to account for nonidealities in the PUF's building blocks to prevent PUF quality degradation.

Design considerations for a CMOS 65-nm RTN-based PUF

“…For ROFF, the lowest value corresponds to the input voltage being equal to 0V and the highest when it is equal to 1.2V. These results are in line with the established thresholds for RON and ROFF ratios that were obtained in [11].…”

“…The design of the switches deserves, as demonstrated in [11], careful consideration. The strategy here was to consider two elements: (1) a limit for the detection of RTN changes (i.e., the fastest RTN event that can be completely detected);…”

“…The quality of the RTN-PUF has been demonstrated in [6] and design preliminaries were discussed in [10] [11]. It was found that, for the 65-nm CMOS technology used as a case study, minimum-size PMOS transistors (W/L = 80nm/60nm) yielded a better PUF response quality.…”