All-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical physical unclonable functions for integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting

Kun Wang; Jianwei Shi; Wenxuan Lai; Qiang He; Jun Xu; Zhenyi Ni; Xinfeng Liu; Xiaodong Pi; Deren Yang

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-47479-y

All-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical physical unclonable functions for integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting

Nat Commun. 2024 Apr 13;15(1):3203. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-47479-y.

Authors

Kun Wang¹, Jianwei Shi^{2

3}, Wenxuan Lai¹, Qiang He¹, Jun Xu^{4

5}, Zhenyi Ni⁶, Xinfeng Liu⁷, Xiaodong Pi^{8

9}, Deren Yang^{10

11}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Silicon and Advanced Semiconductor Materials & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310027, China.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China.
³ State Key Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100083, China.
⁴ School of Electronic Science and Engineering & National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210093, China.
⁵ School of Microelectronics, Nantong University, Nantong, Jiangsu, 226019, China.
⁶ State Key Laboratory of Silicon and Advanced Semiconductor Materials & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310027, China. zyni@zju.edu.cn.
⁷ CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China. liuxf@nanoctr.cn.
⁸ State Key Laboratory of Silicon and Advanced Semiconductor Materials & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310027, China. xdpi@zju.edu.cn.
⁹ Institute of Advanced Semiconductors, ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Centre, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 311215, China. xdpi@zju.edu.cn.
¹⁰ State Key Laboratory of Silicon and Advanced Semiconductor Materials & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310027, China. mseyang@zju.edu.cn.
¹¹ Institute of Advanced Semiconductors, ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Centre, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 311215, China. mseyang@zju.edu.cn.

Abstract

Integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting based on optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) plays a crucial role in guaranteeing secure identification and authentication for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While considerable efforts have been devoted to exploring optical PUFs, two critical challenges remain: incompatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and limited information entropy. Here, we demonstrate all-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs fabricated by integrating silicon (Si) metasurface and erbium-doped Si quantum dots (Er-Si QDs) with a CMOS-compatible procedure. Five in-situ optical responses have been manifested within a single pixel, rendering an ultrahigh information entropy of 2.32 bits/pixel. The position-dependent optical responses originate from the position-dependent radiation field and Purcell effect. Our evaluation highlights their potential in IoT security through advanced metrics like bit uniformity, similarity, intra- and inter-Hamming distance, false-acceptance and rejection rates, and encoding capacity. We finally demonstrate the implementation of efficient lightweight mutual authentication protocols for IoT applications by using the all-Si multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs.