Embedding security into ferroelectric FET array via in situ memory operation

Journal Article · 13 December 2023 · Nature Communications

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43941-5 · OSTI ID:2229796

Xu, Yixin  ^[1]; Xiao, Yi ^[1]; Zhao, Zijian ^[2]; Müller, Franz  ^[3]; Vardar, Alptekin ^[3]; Gong, Xiao ^[4]; George, Sumitha  ^[5]; Kämpfe, Thomas  ^[3]; Narayanan, Vijaykrishnan ^[1]; Ni, Kai  ^[2]

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1. Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA (United States)
2. University of Notre Dame, IN (United States)
3. Fraunhofer IPMS, Dresden (Germany)
4. National University of Singapore (Singapore)
5. North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND (United States)

Non-volatile memories (NVMs) have the potential to reshape next-generation memory systems because of their promising properties of near-zero leakage power consumption, high density and non-volatility. However, NVMs also face critical security threats that exploit the non-volatile property. Compared to volatile memory, the capability of retaining data even after power down makes NVM more vulnerable. Existing solutions to address the security issues of NVMs are mainly based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which incurs significant performance and power overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight memory encryption/decryption scheme by exploiting in-situ memory operations with negligible overhead. To validate the feasibility of the encryption/decryption scheme, device-level and array-level experiments are performed using ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) as an example NVM without loss of generality. Besides, a comprehensive evaluation is performed on a 128 × 128 FeFET AND-type memory array in terms of area, latency, power and throughput. Compared with the AES-based scheme, our scheme shows ~22.6×/~14.1× increase in encryption/decryption throughput with negligible power penalty. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our scheme over the AES-based scheme when deploying different neural network workloads. Our scheme yields significant latency reduction by 90% on average for encryption and decryption processes.

• Research Organization: Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES); USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0021118; DESC0021118
• OSTI ID: 2229796
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 2282883
• Journal Information: Nature Communications, Vol. 14, Issue 1; ISSN 2041-1723
• Publisher: Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English