First Demonstration of Tunnel Fet-Based Physical Unclonable Function with Independent Entropy Source Through Ambipolar Current Modulation

In this work, for the first time, a novel tunnel FET (TFET) with modulated asymmetric ambipolar current is proposed for physical unclonable function (PUF) applications with the independent entropy source at the drain side. In the proposed TFET, an underlap region is introduced to enlarge the variation of drain tunnel current for PUF while maintaining the relatively small variation at the source tunnel junction for logic or memory applications. This designed asymmetrical and independent variability of novel TFET devices are experimentally demonstrated on 300 mm CMOS baseline platform. An AND-type TFET array as weak PUF is also designed and experimentally demonstrated with <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 50 \%$</tex> interPUF hamming distance. The worst raw BER at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$85^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$</tex> after 4000 evaluations is only 0.46 %, demonstrating the great potential of TFET for robust hardware security.