A Practical Sense Amplifier Design for Memristive Crossbar Circuits (PUF)

As CMOS process scaling is nearing to an end, emerging non-volatile devices such as memristors have been explored extensively in circuit design due to their very low footprint, non-volatility and low power application. Memristors, however, display a wide variety of characteristics depending on their inter-lying materials, as is the case for any emerging nano-devices. In this paper, we have designed a sense amplifier which is well-suited to applications of HfOx memristor based crossbar circuits. Specifically, we have successfully integrated this sense amplifier into our memristive crossbar physical unclonable function (PuF) as a part of our chip that we are fabricating. Our designed sense amplifier is able to operate reliably and reasonably fast at near-to-ground input and low supply voltage and with small voltage differences between the bit-lines. We have performed several Monte Carlo analysis to choose optimal design and device parameters and thus evaluated our proposed design for real hardware applications.