A Novel Lightweight PUFs Using Interconnect Line Mismatch for Hardware Security

The emerging physical unclonable functions (PUFs) in the IC supply chain pose not only a challenge to security threats, but also a serious concern about hardware efficiency. Traditional PUF relies on the mismatch of the device, and it may occupy lager area of the chip. In this paper, the physical unclonable function based on interconnect line mismatch is proposed with lightweight property. Due to the inevitable random difference in the process of the interconnect, the delay of the two lines will be different, to produce the random data of the PUF circuits. Then, PUF array is designed with control circuit, PUF cell circuit, and output circuit. Under the TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology, the proposed PUF can provide the physical random entropy source. Using Cadence simulation EDA tools, the experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of PUF circuits. And it operates at 1.2 V, ensures randomness and uniqueness with 48.6% hamming distance. Compared with other state-of-the-arts, the hardware cost reduces more than 15%. The experiment results show that interconnect line PUF provides better lightweight and randomness.