Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have gained attention in recent years due to the increasing demand for secure, compact, and power-efficient electronic devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). PUFs can provide a unique physical fingerprint to each device, which is a valuable means of enhancing security through the generation of unique and volatile cryptographic keys with no need to store them in nonvolatile memory (NVM). A major concern regarding PUF solutions for low-cost authentication is achieving robustness, a large challenge-response pair (CRP) space, and high reliability against environmental variations at the same time. In this work, we present a PUF system based on embedded phase change memory (PCM) in the virgin state with an industry-standard one-transistor/one-resistor (1T1R) cell, exploiting the wide resistance distribution as an entropy source. The PUF system is validated based on extensive physics-based simulations of embedded PCM cells integrated with 90-nm technology, showing raw reliability in temperature comparable with state-of-the-art solutions which can be further improved using dedicated schemes for the selection of reliable CRPs.
Authors: L. Cattaneo, D. Ielmini
Institution: Politecnico di Milano
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4402040144