Patent 9485094 was granted and assigned to Maxim Integrated Products on November, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Various embodiments of the invention allow to take advantage of the natural statistical variation of physical properties in a semiconductor device in order to create truly random, repeatable, and hard to detect cryptographic bits. In certain embodiments, this is accomplished by pairing mismatch values of PUF elements so as to ensure that PUF key bits generated thereform remain insensitive to environmental errors, without affecting the utilization rate of available PUF elements.