ASCH-PUF: A “Zero” Bit Error Rate CMOS Physically Unclonable Function With Dual-Mode Low-Cost Stabilization

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are increasingly adopted for low-cost and secure secret key and chip ID generations for embedded and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Achieving 100% reproducible keys across wide temperature and voltage variations over the lifetime of a device is critical and conventionally requires large masking or error correction code (ECC) overhead to guarantee. This article presents an automatic self checking and healing (ASCH) stabilization technique for a state-of-the-art PUF cell design based on sub-threshold inverter chains. The ASCH system successfully removes all unstable PUF cells without the need for expensive temperature sweeps during unstable bit detection. By accurately finding all unstable bits without expensive temperature sweeps to find all unstable bits, ASCH achieves ultra-low bit error rate (BER), thus significantly reducing the costs of using ECC and enrolment. Our ASCH can operate in two modes, a static mode (S-ASCH) with a conventional pre-enrolled unstable bit mask and a dynamic mode (D-ASCH) that further eliminates the need for non-volatile memories (NVMs) for storing masks. The proposed ASCH-PUF is fabricated and evaluated in the 65-nm CMOS. The ASCH system achieves “0” BER (BER,
$< 1.77E-9$
) across temperature variations in
$- 20\,\,^{\circ }\text{C}$
–
$125~^{\circ }\text{C}$
, and voltage variations in 0.7–1.4 V, by masking 31% and 35% of all fabricated PUF bits in the S-ASCH and D-ASCH modes, respectively. The prototype achieves a measured throughput of 11.4 Gb/s with 0.057 fJ/b core energy efficiency at 1.2 V,
$25~^{\circ }\text{C}$
.