Serial Polar Automorphism Ensemble Decoders for Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract: Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) involve challenging practical applications of error-correcting codes (ECCs), requiring extremely low failure rates on the order of $10^{-6}$ and below despite raw input bit error rates as high as 22%. These requirements call for an efficient ultra-low rate code design. In this work, we propose a novel coding scheme tailored for PUFs based on Polar codes and a low-complexity version of automorphism ensemble decoding (AED). Notably, our serial AED scheme reuses a single successive cancellation (SC) decoder across multiple decoding attempts. By introducing cascaded and recursive interleavers, we efficiently scale the number of AED candidates without requiring expensive large multiplexers. An aggressive quantization strategy of only 3 bits per message further reduces the area requirements of the underlying SC decoder. The resulting coding scheme achieves the same block error rate of $10^{-6}$ as our baseline based on Bose-Ray-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes while requiring 1.75x fewer codeword bits to encode the same K = 312 payload bits. This reduction translates directly into 1.75x less helper data storage and, consequently, a smaller overall chip area.