14.2 A physically unclonable function with BER <10⁻⁸ for robust chip authentication using oscillator collapse in 40nm CMOS

Security is a key concern in today's mobile devices and a number of hardware implementations of security primitives have been proposed, including true random number generators, differential power attack avoidance, and chip-ID generators [1-4]. Recently, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) were proposed as a secure method for chip authentication in unsecure environments [5-7]. A PUF is a function that maps an input code ("challenge') to an output code (“response”) in a manner that is unique for every chip. PUFs are increasingly used for IC authentication to offer protection against identity theft, cloning, and counterfeit components [2-4].