An Optically-Reconfigurable PUF Based on Logarithmic Photoreceptor of CMOS Dynamic Vision Sensors

In this brief, a novel optically-reconfigurable physical unclonable function (OR-PUF) is presented for CMOS dynamic vision sensor (DVS). By utilizing the in-pixel logarithmic photoreceptor’s spatial photoresponse nonuniformity (PRNU) as the entropy source, raw physical unclonable function (PUF) bits having high reliability and randomness can be generated with monochromatic illumination in visible spectrum. In addition, the proposed OR-PUF can be reconfigured to new challenge-response-pair (CRP) spaces under the illumination with different visible wavelengths. Moreover, the proposed implementation is validated by prototype chips fabricated using a 0.18-
$\mu \text{m}$
standard CMOS process. Featuring excellent randomness by passing the widely-adopted National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and autocorrelation function (ACF) test tools, the fabricated PUF chips exhibit a uniqueness of 49.37% and a worst case bit error rate (BER) of 1.93% under the voltage–temperature (VT) range of 0 °C–80 °C and 1.65–2.2 V.