Reliability Analysis and Performance Evaluation of STT-MRAM-Based Physical Unclonable Function

Physical unclonable function (PUF) is considered as a promising primitive for variety of security applications since its appearance, such as authentication, key generators and random oracle. With the fast development of Internet of Things (IoT), the requirement for low complexity, high power efficiency and enhanced security level of PUF becomes urgent. Meanwhile, the conventional PUF instances based on optical effect and semiconductors fail to meet the requirements due to poor scalability and sensitivity to attacks. This paper proposes a circuit design of PUF by utilizing the spin transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM). The performance of presented circuit design is thoroughly investigated from the aspects of uniqueness, reliability, uniformity, diffuseness, access speed and energy consumption. The simulation results show that the inter-Hamming distance can achieve 50% and the intra-Hamming distance can be reduced as low as 0%, resulting in perfect security. Meanwhile, the circuit behaves high immunity to environmental variations such as high and low temperature. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, many powerful attack methods emerge. To defend against these attacks, the user reconfigurable function has been proposed. Moreover, design space including programming voltage, device parameters and thermal conditions has been explored to optimize the reliability of this function.