FinFET Based Low Power Ring Oscillator Physical Unclonable Functions

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are promising hardware security primitives which are suitable for low power applications, such as the Internet of Thing (IoT). The Ring Oscillator (RO) PUF is one of the most reliable and strong PUFs. On the other hand, it consumes more power than others. The main aim of this paper is to propose a design for a low power RO-PUF. The proposed design is based on utilizing modules that consume less power than the conventional one. In the proposed design the frequency divider (FD) and the D-flipflop (DFF) are employed instead of the counters, the timer, and the comparator circuits. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed design can effectively reduce power consumption. The proposed PUF was designed using 20 nm FinFET technology. The proposed PUF consumes
$\mathbf{264}\ \mu\mathbf{w}$
per challenge-response pair at supply voltage 0.9 V. The averaged reliability of the proposed design is 99.5%, over a range of temperature from -40 to 125°C and supply voltage from 0.8 V to 1 V. The proposed PUF decreases the power consumption while maintaining highperformance metrics.