A Study of Physical Unclonable Function by Dielectric Breakdown in High-κ Metal Gate Device

A complementary 3T-PUF cell is proposed and implemented by 28nm High-κ Metal Gate (HKMG) CMOS logic process. The new PUF cell takes use of gate dielectric breakdown on either side of the center transistor arbitrarily with self-inhibit mechanism, the cell can create and store uniquely random data. A unique negative bias read achieves the clear distribution of resistive states so that it can be established. Experiments show that the complementary 3T-PUF cell provides good data stability after long-term read stress and high temperature bake. The uniqueness and randomness of PUF array are further evaluated by Hamming-Distance (HD) and following Hamming-Weight (HW).