SRAM PUF quality and reliability comparison for 28 nm planar vs. 16 nm FinFET CMOS processes

SRAM physical unclonable function (PUF) provides a low-cost security key to address hardware attacks such as cloning as well as for reliability tracking of ICs in the field. In this work the quality and aging reliability of 28 nm high-K metal gate planar and 16 nm FinFET based SRAMs are discussed in detail with regards to their use in PUF. Data indicates that 16 nm FinFET process has a better SRAM PUF quality without any design modifications compared to the 28 nm planar process. In addition, the aging-induced bit instability is shown to be a reasonably small percentage of the overall bit counts.