Design Principles for a Novel Lightweight Configurable PUF Using a Reconfigurable FET

This article presents a mixed signal-based novel configurable ring oscillator (CRO) physical unclonable function (PUF) architecture for resource constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. PUF can protect the IoT devices through their unique inherited fingerprints obtained from the manufacture variations. However, the conventional ring oscillator (RO) PUF need multiple replicas of ROs to produce a large set of challenge response pairs (CRPs) which invalidates its usage in an IoT environment. Using the concept of reconfigurable hetero material hetero dielectric FET (HM-HD-RFET) proposed in this manuscript, we have designed a novel CRO which allows 512 challenges and a sigma delta analog to digital converter (ADC) at the end generates a stream of response bits. HM-HD-RFET can be configured into four different combinations of transistors through two polarity gates (PGs) and their switching can be controlled using a control gate (CG). Next, we compare HM-HD-RFET with configurable silicon FET (Si-RFET) and homogenous dielectric FET (HM-RFET) to show that the proposed device performs well in all of the four configurations with negligible ambipolarity. The device characteristics is realized in Silvaco Atlas tool, circuit implementation is done in Cadence using Verilog-A based look table approach and properties of CRO PUF are computed in MATLAB.