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nanotimes News in Brief

11-01 :: December 2010 / January 2011

Security // Fingerprint Makes Chips Counterfeit-Proof

searchers from the German Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT will be demons- trating how electronic components or chips can be made counterfeit-proof using physical unclonable functions (PUFs).

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t the embedded world Exhibition & Conference in Nuremberg, Germany, from March 1 to 3, re-

“Every component has a kind of individual finger- print since small differences inevitably arise between components during production,” explains Dominik Merli, a scientist at Fraunhofer SIT in Garching near Munich. Printed circuits, for instance, end up with minimal variations in thickness or length during the manufacturing process. While these variations do not affect functionality, they can be used to generate a