An Integrated TRNG-PUF Architecture Based on Photovoltaic Solar Cells

This article presents an integrated true random number generator (TRNG) and physically unclonable function (PUF) architecture using photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. We illustrate that the PV solar cell sensor response can be engineered into dynamic (TRNG) and static responses (PUF). The proposed prototype uses the iterative Von Neumann postprocessing scheme to produce random bits with 34% better throughput compared to a single Von Neumann operation. The random bit quality was checked by statistical test suites from the National Institute of Science and Technology and achieves an average p-value of 0.45 at all variations in light intensity. The PUF response achieves 92.13% reliability and 50.91% uniformity. The integrated TRNG-PUF architecture is beneficial for resource-constrained cyber-physical system.