Highly Reliable Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM-Based Physical Unclonable Function With Multi-Response-Bits Per Cell
- 10 April 2015
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
- Vol. 10 (8), 1630-1642
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tifs.2015.2421481
Abstract
Memory-based physical unclonable function (MemPUF) has gained tremendous popularity in the recent years to securely preserve secret information in computing systems. Most MemPUFs in the literature have unreliable bit generation and/or are incapable of generating more than one response-bit per cell. Hence, we propose a novel MemPUF exploiting the unique characteristics of spin-transfer torque magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) that can overcome these issues. Bit generation in our STT-MRAM-based MemPUF is stabilized using a novel automatic write-back technique. In addition, the alterability of the magnetic tunneling junction state is exploited to expand the response-bit capacity per cell. Our analysis demonstrated the advantage of our scheme in reliability enhancement (bit-error rate from ~10 -1 to ~10 -6 in the worst case under varying conditions) and response-bit capacity per cell improvement (from 1 to 1.48 bit). In comparison with the conventional MemPUFs, our approach is also better in terms of the average chip area and energy for producing a response-bit.Keywords
Funding Information
- Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier II MOE2013-T2-2-017
- National Science Foundation
- Semiconductor Research Corporation
- Center for Spintronics Materials, Interfaces, and Architecture (C-SPIN), a StarNet center funded by Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
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