On Quaternary 1-of-4 ID Generator Circuits

A quaternary 1-of-4 ID generator circuit is presented. It exploits the properties of quaternary metastability to provide stable n-bit IDs tolerant to the effects of nanoscale process scaling and temperature variations, which is achieved by increasing the margin between threshold voltage and metastability voltage via quaternary metastability. A 128-bit ID generator hardware implementation and electrical evaluation yields an average of 26.6% uniqueness of ID bits and 100% stability rate over a 10°C to 40°C temperature range.