Highly Reliable and Secure PUF Using Resistive Memory Integrated Into a 28 nm CMOS Process

Owing to the increased demand for secure communication channels and authentication steps, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are increasingly important for hardware security. In this article, we report a novel PUF architecture and generation scheme that utilizes the inherent program-time variation of resistive random access memory (ReRAM) cells as an entropy source. ReRAM cells are integrated into a standard 28 nm CMOS manufacturing process, and also show robust non-volatile memory operation. We generated a PUF data set larger than $10^{{8}}$ bits and verified its randomness using a standard NIST test suite. Further verifications such as inter- and intra-hamming distance, 150 °C data retention of PUF bits, and spatial co-relation tests confirm the high reliability of the generated PUF keys.