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Abstract
Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies such as Magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM), Resistive RAM (ReRAM), Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM), and Phase Change Memory (PCM) have shown great potential for building next-generation computing systems because of their near-zero leakage, unlimited endurance, scalability, fast speed, and high-density characteristics. While the MRAM has the potential to replace static RAM (SRAM) in large-scale and low-power on-chip caches and dynamic RAM (DRAM) in energy-efficient main memory, the ReRAM is a promising candidate for low-power and large-scale main memory and storage systems. Emerging cost-effective, low latency, high performance, and low energy memories can be used as a stand-alone memory chip or integrated at the same process nodes of microcontrollers, system-on-chip, and FPGAs; thus becoming an excellent candidate for applications requiring high security and efficient NVM embedded in semiconductors such as Internet of Things (IoT), wearables, tablets, smartphones, consumer electronics, artificial intelligence, industrial, automotive, and medical. While these memories play essential roles in performance, they can also be used as core components to ensure system and supply-chain security. Higher levels of security can be achieved by implementing security primitives or digital signatures within integrated circuit semiconductor hardware and using them in secure communication, authentication, and other cryptographic operations. On the other hand, these inherent properties of emerging memories can be used to protect cloning and other means of counterfeiting. This thesis will explore the prospect of emerging memory chips to ensure system and supply-chain security issues. First, a new idea of hiding information in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ReRAM is presented for secure and covert data storage. Second, this work proposes a low-cost, non-invasive, robust watermarking technique using COTS ReRAM to identify major counterfeiting types, such as remarked, overproduced, and cloned. Third, COTS MRAM-based security primitive, i.e., True random number generator or TRNG, is proposed and demonstrated for low-cost alternatives to generate random keys, cryptographic nonces, session keys, one-time-pad, etc., for the secure operation of electronic devices and systems.