Highly Reliable PUF Circuits Using Efficient Post-Processing Stabilization Technique

A Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) circuit is purposefully engineered to leverage the inherent variations in manufacturing processes to generate distinct identities. However, the efficacy of PUFs can be compromised due to the influence of external factors such as noise and environmental variations, which can lead to instability of identities. In this paper, a novel post-processing stabilization technique is introduced, utilizing a mismatch recombination algorithm and resulting in a 31× reduction of the Bit Error Rate (BER) to 0.19%. Through the application of this stabilization technique in conjunction with a modified self-compared Ring Oscillator (RO) architecture, the proposed PUF achieves a uniqueness of 49.96%. Moreover, the proposed PUF exhibits substantial resilience against temperature variations, maintaining a BER of under 2% across the temperature range from 0°C to 45°C. The proposed PUF was implemented and verified on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA.