Total Ionizing Dose Effects on the Power-Up State of Static Random-Access Memory

Power-up states of static random-access memory (SRAM) memories are often used for generating physical unclonable functions (PUFs) in a variety of integrated circuits. The integrity of PUFs derived from commercial SRAM memories in radiation-prone environments has been recently recognized as an important problem and it remains an open issue. We perform both experimental evaluation and simulation analysis to quantify the effects of irradiation on the power-up state of commercial SRAM chips. Our results show that SRAM-PUF is significantly altered after irradiation, thus limiting its use in radiation-prone environments. The SRAM-PUF bit error rate (BER) increases monotonically with an increase in the total ionizing dose (TID), exceeding 15% after 100 krad(Si). We observe small annealing effects over time, but the BER remains high even five months after irradiation.