Aging Resilient and Energy Efficient Ring Oscillator for PUF Design

Abstract

Hardware-based security primitives play an important role in protecting and securing a system in Internet of Things (loT) applications. The most important primitives are Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and True Random Number Generators (TRNGs), Cryptographic Accelerators etc. Out of them, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have come out to be most popular low-cost security primitives for authentication and cryptographic key generation. However, the PUF’s stability with respect to variations over time still limits its usefulness and widespread acceptance. One of the main problems limiting the performance of PUFs is their aging over time. Previous literatures focused towards improving PUF robustness against aging but the power budget of the ring oscillator used in the design of these PUFs limits their usage for low power applications, keeping this concern in mind a low power variant of RO PUF is much needed. Hence in this paper, we propose a new energy efficient and aging resilient inverter and RO based on aging resilient inverter design. The proposed inverter is 22.57% less power consuming and 16% faster than the conventional Aging Resilient inverter while showing nearly same aging characteristics. Also the Ring Oscillator designed from the proposed inverter shows nearly 1.5% higher frequency than the conventional Aging resilient Ring oscillator for same number of inverter stages. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.