A reconfigurable arbiter PUF based on STT-MRAM

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure, electronic devices are becoming ubiquitous, in which authentication and secure communication are required. As a result, novel hardware security primitives have been developed to overcome the deficiencies of conventional security methods and address the growing security issues. Physical unclonable function (PUF) is an emerging hardware security primitive that plays an important role in authenticity and reliability of integrated circuits (ICs). Spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random access memory (STT-MRAM) is a promising technology that is dense, fast, non-volatile, highly endurant and energy-efficient. STT-MRAM is considered a promising primitive as it has several intrinsic randomness sources, such as stochastic switching, process variations and statistical read/write failures. This paper proposes a novel hybrid STT-MRAM/complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) based reconfigurable arbiter PUF. The functionality of the design is validated by a 28nm CMOS technology and a compact magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) model. Simulation results show that the proposed PUF has a mean intra-hamming distance (HD) of 0.24%, a mean inter-HD of 51.1% and passes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical tests.