Ferroelectric FET-based strong physical unclonable function: a low-power, high-reliable and reconfigurable solution for Internet-of-Things security

Abstract: Hardware security has been a key concern in modern information technologies. Especially, as the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices grows rapidly, to protect the device security with low-cost security primitives becomes essential, among which Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a widely-used solution. In this paper, we propose the first FeFET-based strong PUF exploiting the cycle-to-cycle (C2C) variation of FeFETs as the entropy source. Based on the experimental measurements, the proposed PUF shows satisfying performance including high uniformity, uniqueness, reconfigurability and reliability. To resist machine-learning attack, XOR structure was introduced, and simulations show that our proposed PUF has similar resistance to existing attack models with traditional arbiter PUFs. Furthermore, our design is shown to be power-efficient, and highly robust to write voltage, temperature and device size, which makes it a competitive security solution for Internet-of-Things edge devices.