A Method to Utilize Mismatch Size to Produce an Additional Stable Bit in a Tilting SRAM-Based PUF

Abstract

A new concept for Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), the Mirror PUF, is proposed. The Mirror PUF can be applied to existing preselected PUF circuits by post-processing the preselection test results and has the potential to double the number of effective bits, with no additional area at the bit-cell level. The Mirror PUF utilizes a preselection test, which measures the amount of mismatch within the PUF cell. This data is generally used to determine the mask for a conventional PUF. Here, it is used as an entropy source that is not correlated to the original response of the PUF. Bit-cells with low mismatch are considered as a ‘0’ and cells with high mismatch as a ‘1’. A systematic method is shown for identifying unstable bits in the Mirror PUF response. It classifies the cells to ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ mismatch, such that medium mismatch bits are considered as unstable and masked from the response. The concept was applied to a 65nm Si implementation of the Capacitive Tilt PUF (Shifman et al., 2020). All of the unstable cells of the Mirror PUF, except for 0.03%, were identified and masked, with a worst-case corner Bit Error-Rate (BER) of only 2.35E-5 and 0.00026% erroneous responses across all corners. The application of the Mirror PUF to the Capacitive tilt PUF increased the number of stable response bits by 66%. No observable correlation was found between the responses of the original PUF and the Mirror PUF.

Keywords

• Physical unclonable function
• PUF
• preselection
• metastability
• security