Embedding security into ferroelectric FET array via in situ memory operation

Yixin Xu, Yi Xiao, Zijian Zhao, Franz Müller, Alptekin Vardar, Xiao Gong, Sumitha George, Thomas Kämpfe, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan and Kai Ni ()
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Yixin Xu: Pennsylvania State University
Yi Xiao: Pennsylvania State University
Zijian Zhao: University of Notre Dame
Franz Müller: Fraunhofer IPMS
Alptekin Vardar: Fraunhofer IPMS
Xiao Gong: National University of Singapore
Sumitha George: North Dakota State University
Thomas Kämpfe: Fraunhofer IPMS
Vijaykrishnan Narayanan: Pennsylvania State University
Kai Ni: University of Notre Dame

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43941-5

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