PUF designed with Resistive RAM and Ternary States

Abstract

The designs of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) described in this paper are based on Resistive RAMs incorporating ternary states with the objective to reduce false negative authentications (FNA) with low Challenge-Response-Pair (CRP) error rates. Unlike other error correction method, the method is not increasing false positive authentications (FPA). The ternary states, the "Xs", allow the blanking of all cells that are not characterized as consistently capable to generate stable and easy to read "1s" or "0s" PUF challenges. Experimental data extracted from Cu/TaOx/Pt Resistive RAM samples confirms that such a method can generate CRPs having error rates below 8 ppm useable for secure hardware authentication. Random Number Generators (RNG) can also be enhanced by the same ternary architecture.