A Physical Unclonable Function based on Capacitor Mismatch in a Charge-Redistribution SAR-ADC

Abstract

A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) using capacitor mismatch in a standard successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR-ADC) as the entropy source is demonstrated in 65nm CMOS. SAR-ADCs are readily available in many system-on-chips, making the hardware overhead of the proposed PUF almost negligible. The inherent process variation of metal-oxide-metal (MOM) capacitors is harnessed through a charge redistribution operation which is sampled by the voltage comparator. To enhance the stability of the PUF output, soft response generation and dynamic thresholding techniques were adopted. Finally, we verify that performing the enrollment operation at a lower operating voltage can ensure that PUF responses are stable at the nominal supply voltage used during authentication.