Abstract
We propose a chip identification (ID) generating scheme with random variation of transistor characteristics in SRAM bitcells. In the proposed scheme, a unique fingerprint is generated by grounding both bitlines in write operations. Through minor modifications, this scheme can be implemented for existing SRAMs. It has high speed, and it can be implemented in a very small area overhead. The generated fingerprint mainly reflects threshold voltages of load transistors in the bitcells. We fabricated test chips in a 65-nm process and obtained 12,288 sets of unique 128-bit fingerprints, which are evaluated in this paper. The failure rate of the IDs is found to be 2.1×10-12.
