Low-Power Two-Phase Clocking Adiabatic PUF Circuit

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled battery-powered devices to transmit sensitive data, while presenting high power consumption and security issues. To address these challenges, adiabatic-based physical unclonable functions (PUFs) offer a promising solution for low-power and secure IoT device applications. In this study, we propose a novel low-power two-phase clocking adiabatic PUF. The proposed adiabatic PUF utilizes a trapezoidal power clock signal with a time-ramped voltage to achieve an improved energy efficiency and reliable start-up PUF behavior. Static CMOS logic is employed to produce stable challenge-response pairs (CRPs) in the adiabatic mode. The pull-down network is designed to control the PUF cell to charge and discharge its output nodes with a constant supply current during secure key generation. The body effect of PMOS transistors, ambient temperatures, and CMOS process variations are investigated to examine the uniqueness and reliability of the proposed work. The proposed adiabatic PUF is simulated using 0.18 µm CMOS process technology with a supply voltage of 1.8 V. The uniqueness and reliability of the proposed adiabatic PUF are 49.82% and 99.47%, respectively. In addition, it requires a start-up power of 0.47 µW and consumes an energy of 15.98 fJ/bit/cycle at the reference temperature of 27 °C.