Design of the RRAM-Based Polymorphic Look-Up Table Scheme

The polymorphic gates are the circuit cells that deliver different functions with the different external input, supply voltage or temperature. It is an effective method to resist the reverse engineering attacks, for the attackers cannot distinguish the correct function based on the netlist of the circuit. The researchers have found out that the RRAM based Look-Up Table (LUT) has higher performance and less area, comparing with the CMOS based counterparts. However, the attackers can tell the functions of the previous proposed RRAM based LUTs by measuring the resistance states of the RRAM cells. This work proposes an RRAM based polymorphic gate, which implements 16 basic logic functions with 8 RRAM cells in 4 working cycles. Furthermore, the multi-input LUT scheme is proposed based on the polymorphic gate. It is difficult for the attackers to distinguish the circuit function, because the function of the LUT is determined by the applied voltages and the resistance states of the RRAM devices, and the n-input LUT circuit is implemented with the constant area regardless of the number of inputs.