A Strong Physically Unclonable Function With >2⁸⁰ CRPs and <1.4% BER Using Passive ReRAM Technology

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a strong physically unclonable function (PUF) circuit featuring >280 challenge-response pair (CRP) capacity, ${F }= 250$ -nm half-pitch $64\times 64$ ReRAM circuits. Passive crossbar circuits with $4{F} ^{2}$ area per crosspoint device and reduced peripheral overhead, not requiring any circuitry for programming, result in an extremely compact design, while low-power consumption is achieved by keeping ReRAM devices in the highly resistive, virgin states. The key contributions of this letter is a novel leakage injection approach using an electrically isolated portion of the crossbar array, which boosts PUF’s robustness, and a key-booking scheme, which dramatically improves reliability across a wide temperature range of operation and further increases PUF circuit density by reducing error correcting overheads. The experimental results showed near-ideal functional performance metrics, including 49.55% uniformity, 49.95% diffuseness, and 49.25% uniqueness. The measured response also passed all relevant NIST randomness tests.