Diode-PUF for Intelligent Electronic Devices

Physically unclonable function (PUF) can be generated from unique physical variations occurring naturally during semiconductor manufacturing. These signatures can be extracted from individual electronic components and combined in different ways to generate a large unique identifier for an electronic device such as the Intelligent Electronic Device (IED). PUFs can inherently be used for applications such as authentication, key generation, tracing, anti-counterfeiting, identification etc. In this work, we demonstrate our PUF signature extracted from diodes present in the output ports of the IED. We exploit the cut-in voltage region variations across the diodes to demonstrate the properties of the PUF. Uniqueness of the signatures are further enhanced by compensating for temperature variations and combating the lead wire losses.