A Physical Unclonable Function Leveraging Hot Carrier Injection Aging

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are low-cost cryptographic primitives used to generate unique, secure, and stable IDs for device authentication and secure communication. PUFs rely on process variation inherent in the manufacturing flow making it impossible to predict or clone chip IDs providing a high level of security and tamper resistance. A commonly studied PUF is the memory PUF which suffers high Bit Error Rate (BER) across environmental conditions. This paper introduces a novel NFET PUF featuring a Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) stress mechanism to lower BER to near zero. Post-Si data from a lkb PUF array fabricated in Intel4 FinFET technology is presented in comparison to a hybrid-SRAM style PUF. BER results were studied with different stress parameters enabling manufacturing flow for HCI based PUFs.