Pass Transistor XOR Gate Based Radiation Hardened RO-PUF

Abstract

Hardware security is important and need of the hour particularly for low cost electronic devices. Hardware-based encryption designs such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs) outperform any known software-based cryptography technique in terms of attack deterrence. This paper proposes a novel design of Three-Transistor (3T) XOR gate based ring-oscillator (RO) PUF. This XOR gate is used as its main element because of its high critical charge than those present in the literature. The critical charge of this XOR gate being 35.52% higher as compared to the inverter. The 3T XOR gate based PUF is then designed with improved uniqueness and reliability at different operating temperatures. The uniqueness of the proposed PUF design is 0.4958 which is better as compared to other counterparts. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.