A Highly-Reliable and Energy-Efficient Physical Unclonable Function Based on 4T All-MOSFET Subthreshold Voltage Reference
Peizhou Gan, Yiheng Wu, Yuan Cao, Xiaojin Zhao · 2019
In this paper, an energy-efficient physical unclonable function (PUF) is presented with high reliability against environmental variations. By introducing a novel 4T subthreshold voltage reference, the proposed PUF implementation can exhibit a greatly enhanced reliability with wide ranges of temperature and supply voltage. Based on a customized voltage comparator, the binary PUF response is generated by comparing and digitizing two output voltages randomly selected from the voltage reference array. In addition, featuring a normalized PUF bitcell size of 2620F2and an energy consumption per bit as low as 12.5fJ/bit, the proposed PUF is validated by our reported extensive simulation results using standard 65nm CMOS technology. With the operating temperature varying from -40°C to 140°C and the supply voltage varying from 0.8V to 1.4V, the native bit error rate (BER) without any correction is reported to be 0.7% and 1.05%, respectively. Moreover, the superior randomness is verified by passing the widely-adopted NIST randomness test suite and the uniqueness is calculated to be 49.98%.