2019/05/30 by Ahish Shylendra, Swarup Bhunia, Shylendra, Ahish +3
Computer Science · Engineering · Neuroscience · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #FOS: Electrical engineering #Neuroscience and Neural Engineering #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1906.01075
openalex publication_date 2019/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Detection of counterfeit chips has emerged as a crucial concern. Physically-unclonable-function (PUF)-based techniques are widely used for authentication, however, require dedicated hardware and large signature database. In this work, we show intrinsic & database-free authentication using back-end capacitors. The discussed technique simplifies authentication setup and reduces the test cost. We show that an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) can be modified for back-end capacitor-based authentication in addition to its regular functionality; hence, a dedicated authentication module is not necessary. Moreover, since back-end capacitors are quite insensitive to temperature and aging-induced variations than transistors, the discussed technique result in a more reliable authentication than transistor PUF-based authentication. The modifications to conventional ADC incur 3.2% power overhead and 75% active-area overhead; however, arguably, the advantages of the discussed intrinsic & database-free authentication outweigh the overheads. Full version of this article is published at IEEE TVLSI.