A Novel Ring Oscillator PUF for FPGA Based on Feedforward Ring Oscillators

A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) exploits uncontrollable variations in manufacturing to characterize an integrated circuit. There have been many PUF designs proposed which apply different strategies to extract process variation on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Ring Oscillator PUF (RO PUF) is one of the FPGA-friendly designs taking advantage of the difference in hardware delay to generate an unpredictable output of a silicon device. This paper proposes a novel variation of RO PUF on FPGA based on feedforward ring oscillators (FRO). The experiment results of FRO PUF are conducted on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and illustrate satisfactory results in uniqueness, uniformity, and reliability with 50.23%, 52.64%, and 95.92%, respectively.