Feasibility of Physical Unclonable Functions from Pre-stressed Organic Thin Film Transistors for Secure Microelectronics

Pre-stressed commercial Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFT) have been characterized to evaluate their suitability for Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) implementation, when the variability of the drain current (I D ) is used as entropy source. Different kinds of electrical pre-stresses have been considered, to study their impact on the PUF reproducibility. Uniqueness and Uniformity of the resulting PUFs have also been evaluated. The proposed pre-stressed OTFTs based PUFs show a reproducibility up to 0.99, with a uniformity and uniqueness of 0.52 and 0.50, respectively. • Pre-stressed OTFTs have been evaluated for PUF implementation, using the variability of I D as entropy source. • Although I D shows transients and drifts, for some specific stress conditions, I D tends to saturation. • Their high uniformity (0.52), uniqueness (0.50) and reproducibility (0.99) have been demonstrated after pre-stress and bit selection. • Pre-stress improves PUF reliability so OTFTs based PUFs could be used for cryptographical applications.