Digital bimodal functions and digital physical unclonable functions: Architecture and applications

Abstract

Security and low power have emerged to become two essential requirements to modern design. The rapid growth of small form, mobile, and remote sensor network systems require secure and ultra-low power data collection and communication solutions due to their energy constraints. The physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have emerged as a popular new type of modern security primitive. They have the properties of low power/energy, small area, and high speed. Moreover, they have excellent security properties and are resilient against physical and side-channel attacks. However, traditional PUFs have two major problems. The first is that the current designs are analog in nature and lack stability in environmental and operational variations, e.g., supply voltage and temperature. The second is that due to the analog nature, the analog PUFs are difficult to be integrated into existing digital circuitry.