Biblio
The digital low dropout regulators are widely used because it can operate at low supply voltage. In the digital low drop-out regulators, the high sampling frequency circuit has a short setup time, but it will produce overshoot, and then the output can be stabilized; although the low sampling frequency circuit output can be directly stabilized, the setup time is too long. This paper proposes a two sampling frequency circuit model, which aims to include the high and low sampling frequencies in the same circuit. By controlling the sampling frequency of the circuit under different conditions, this allows the circuit to combine the advantages of the circuit operating at different sampling frequencies. This shortens the circuit setup time and the stabilization time at the same time.
The start-up value of an SRAM cell is unique, random, and unclonable as it is determined by the inherent process mismatch between transistors. These properties make SRAM an attractive circuit for generating encryption keys. The primary challenge for SRAM based key generation, however, is the poor stability when the circuit is subject to random noise, temperature and voltage changes, and device aging. Temporal majority voting (TMV) and bit masking were used in previous works to identify and store the location of unstable or marginally stable SRAM cells. However, TMV requires a long test time and significant hardware resources. In addition, the number of repetitive power-ups required to find the most stable cells is prohibitively high. To overcome the shortcomings of TMV, we propose a novel data remanence based technique to detect SRAM cells with the highest stability for reliable key generation. This approach requires only two remanence tests: writing `1' (or `0') to the entire array and momentarily shutting down the power until a few cells flip. We exploit the fact that the cells that are easily flipped are the most robust cells when written with the opposite data. The proposed method is more effective in finding the most stable cells in a large SRAM array than a TMV scheme with 1,000 power-up tests. Experimental studies show that the 256-bit key generated from a 512 kbit SRAM using the proposed data remanence method is 100% stable under different temperatures, power ramp up times, and device aging.