Silicon photonic physical unclonable function based on waveguide array embedded with phase shifters.

Area of Science:

• Integrated photonics
• Hardware security
• Quantum information science

Background:

• Silicon photonics offers CMOS compatibility and chip-scale integration for hardware security primitives.
• Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) utilize inherent device variations for secure key generation.
• Optical PUFs present an alternative to electronic PUFs, with silicon photonics being a key platform.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally demonstrate a silicon photonic physical unclonable function (PUF).
• To enable active challenge-response pair generation on-chip.
• To assess the performance and reliability of silicon photonic PUFs.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of an 8-channel silicon photonic waveguide array with integrated phase shifters.
• Implementation of on-chip challenge generation and response detection.
• Testing of multiple device instances from the same wafer to evaluate uniformity and reliability.

Main Results:

• Successful demonstration of a stand-alone silicon photonic PUF.
• Achieved a remarkably low false acceptance rate (FAR) of 4.06 × 10^-21 across six tested devices.
• Validated the feasibility of active, on-chip challenge-response pair generation.

Conclusions:

• Silicon photonic PUFs are a viable and highly secure hardware security primitive.
• The demonstrated device offers a compact, CMOS-compatible solution for on-chip key generation.
• This work paves the way for secure, stand-alone PUF implementations on silicon photonic platforms.