All-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical physical unclonable functions for integrated circuit...

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Optoelectronics
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are vital for Internet of Things (IoT) device security.
• Existing optical PUFs face challenges with CMOS compatibility and limited information entropy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop CMOS-compatible optical PUFs with enhanced information entropy for integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting.
• To address limitations of current optical PUF technologies.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of all-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs using silicon metasurface and erbium-doped silicon quantum dots.
• Integration with a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible procedure.
• Characterization of in-situ optical responses and information entropy.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated five in-situ optical responses within a single pixel, achieving an ultrahigh information entropy of 2.32 bits/pixel.
• Attributed position-dependent optical responses to radiation field and Purcell effect.
• Evaluated PUF performance using metrics like bit uniformity, Hamming distance, and false acceptance/rejection rates.

Conclusions:

• The developed all-Si optical PUFs are CMOS-compatible and offer superior information entropy for IoT security.
• These PUFs enable efficient lightweight mutual authentication protocols for secure IoT applications.