Novel Physical Unclonable Function with process and environmental variations

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are employed to generate unique signature to be used for integrated circuit (IC) identification and authentication. Existing PUFs exploit only process variations for generating unique signature. Due to the spatial correlation between process parameters, such PUFs will be vulnerable to be modeled or leak information under side-channel attacks. The PUF we present in this paper, called PE-PUF, takes into account both process and environmental variations which magnifies chip-to-chip signature randomness and uniqueness. PE-PUF takes into account process variations, temperature, power supply noise and crosstalk; all these effects are major sources of variations and noise in integrated circuits. Designers would be able to select PE-PUF response by applying different input patterns.? Furthermore, PE-PUF imposes no routing constraints to the design. The gates in PE-PUF are distributed across the entire chip and cannot be easily identified/modeled or leak side-channel information. Simulation results demonstrate that each IC can be uniquely characterized by PE-PUF with higher secrecy rate when compared to other PUFs that use only process variations.