A Design of CMOS PUF Based on Ring Oscillator and Time-to-Digital Converter

Physical unclonable functions (PUF) is a promising technique in the field of hardware security with the main principle based on the random variations of inherent semiconductor devices during the fabrication process to provide the secret keys for cryptography or IC identification/authentication. In this paper, we present a new, efficient design of CMOS PUF based on ring oscillators and a time-to-digital converter (TDC). The proposed PUF design provides higher number of respond bits for each challenge, better reliability and uniqueness compared with conventional RO PUF designs. The proposed PUF design is implemented with TSMC 180 nm CMOS process using Cadence Virtuoso tool. The detailed design, simulation and evaluation results are also presented and discussed. The experimental results have clarified the efficiency of the proposed PUF design. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.