Secure Electronics Enabled by Atomically Thin and Photosensitive Two-Dimensional Memtransistors.

The rapid proliferation of security compromised hardware in today's integrated circuit (IC) supply chain poses a global threat to the reliability of communication, computing, and control systems. While there have been significant advancements in detection and avoidance of security breaches, current top-down approaches are mostly inadequate, inefficient, often inconclusive, and resource extensive in time, energy, and cost, offering tremendous scope for innovation in this field. Here, we introduce an energy and area efficient non-von Neumann hardware platform providing comprehensive and bottom-up security solutions by exploiting inherent device-to-device variation, electrical programmability, and persistent photoconductivity demonstrated by atomically thin two-dimensional memtransistors. We realize diverse security primitives including physically unclonable function, anticounterfeit measures, intellectual property (IP) watermarking, and IC camouflaging to prevent false authentication, detect recycled and remarked ICs, protect IP theft, and stop reverse engineering of ICs.