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With the expansion of IoT devices in many aspects of our life, the security of such systems has become an important challenge. Unlike conventional computer systems, any IoT security solution should consider the constraints of these systems such as computational capability, memory, connectivity, and power consumption limitations. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with their special characteristics were introduced to satisfy the security needs while respecting the mentioned constraints. They exploit the uncontrollable and reproducible variations of the underlying component for security applications such as identification, authentication, and communication security. Since IoT devices are typically low cost, it is important to reuse existing elements in their hardware (for instance sensors, ADCs, etc.) instead of adding extra costs for the PUF hardware. Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) devices are widely used in IoT systems as sensors and actuators. In this thesis, a comprehensive study of the potential application of MEMS devices as PUF primitives is provided. MEMS PUF leverages the uncontrollable variations in the parameters of MEMS elements to derive secure keys for cryptographic applications. Experimental and simulation results show that our proposed MEMS PUFs are capable of generating enough entropy for a complex key generation, while their responses show low fluctuations in different environmental conditions.
Keeping in mind that the PUF responses are prone to change in the presence of noise and environmental variations, it is critical to derive reliable keys from the PUF and to use the maximum entropy at the same time. In the second part of this thesis, we elaborate on different key generation schemes and their advantages and drawbacks. We propose the PUF output positioning (POP) and integer linear programming (ILP) methods, which are novel methods for grouping the PUF outputs in order to maximize the extracted entropy. To implement these methods, the key enrollment and key generation algorithms are presented. The proposed methods are then evaluated by applying on the responses of the MEMS PUF, where it can be practically shown that the proposed method outperforms other existing PUF key generation methods.
The final part of this thesis is dedicated to the application of the MEMS PUF as a security solution for IoT systems. We select the mutual authentication of IoT devices and their backend system, and propose two lightweight authentication protocols based on MEMS PUFs. The presented protocols undergo a comprehensive security analysis to show their eligibility to be used in IoT systems. As the result, the output of this thesis is a lightweight security solution based on MEMS PUFs, which introduces a very low overhead on the cost of the hardware.
Ultra-low-power passive telemetry systems for industrial and biomedical applications have gained much popularity lately. The reduction of the power consumption and size of the circuits poses critical challenges in ultra-low-power circuit design. Biotelemetry applications like leakage detection in silicone breast implants require low-power-consuming small-size electronics. In this doctoral thesis, the design, simulation, and measurement of a programmable mixed-signal System-on-Chip (SoC) called General Application Passive Sensor Integrated Circuit (GAPSIC) is presented. Owing to the low power consumption, GAPSIC is capable of completely passive operation. Such a batteryless passive system has lower maintenance complexity and is also free from battery-related health hazards. With a die area of 4.92 mm² and a maximum analog power consumption of 592 µW, GAPSIC has one of the best figure-of-merits compared to similar state-of-the-art SoCs. Regarding possible applications, GAPSIC can read out and digitally transmit the signals of resistive sensors for pressure or temperature measurements. Additionally, GAPSIC can measure electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and conductivity.
The design of GAPSIC complies with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 15693/NFC (near field communication) 5 standard for radio frequency identification (RFID), corresponding to the frequency range of 13.56 MHz. A passive transponder developed with GAPSIC comprises of an external memory storage and very few other external components, like an antenna and sensors. The passive tag antenna and reader antenna use inductive coupling for communication and energy transfer, which enables passive operation. A passive tag developed with GAPSIC can communicate with an NFC compatible smart device or an ISO 15693 RFID reader. An external memory storage contains the programmable application-specific firmware.
As a mixed-signal SoC, GAPSIC includes both analog and digital circuitries. The analog block of GAPSIC includes a power management unit, an RFID/NFC communication unit, and a sensor readout unit. The digital block includes an integrated 32-bit microcontroller, developed by the Hochschule Offenburg ASIC design center, and digital peripherals. A 16-kilobyte random-access memory and a read-only 16-kilobyte memory constitute the GAPSIC internal memory. For the fabrication of GAPSIC, one poly, six-metal 0.18 µm CMOS process is used.
The design of GAPSIC includes two stages. In the first stage, a standalone RFID/NFC frontend chip with a power management unit, an RFID/NFC communication unit, a clock regenerator unit, and a field detector unit was designed. In the second stage, the rest of the functional blocks were integrated with the blocks of the RFID/NFC frontend chip for the final integration of GAPSIC. To reduce the power consumption, conventional low-power design techniques were applied extensively like multiple power supplies, and the operation of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors in the sub-threshold region of operation, as well as further innovative circuit designs.
An overvoltage protection circuit, a power rectifier, a bandgap reference circuit, and two low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulators constitute the power management unit of GAPSIC. The overvoltage protection circuit uses a novel method where three stacked transistor pairs shunt the extra voltage. In the power rectifier, four rectifier units are arranged in parallel, which is a unique approach. The four parallel rectifier units provide the optimal choice in terms of voltage drop and the area required.
The communication unit is responsible for RFID/NFC communication and incorporates demodulation and load modulation circuitry. The demodulator circuit comprises of an envelope detector, a high-pass filter, and a comparator. Following a new approach, the bandgap reference circuit itself acts as the load for the envelope detector circuit, which minimizes the circuit complexity and area. For the communication between the reader and the RFID/NFC tag, amplitude-shift keying (ASK) is used to modulate signals, where the smallest modulation index can be as low as 10%. A novel technique involving a comparator with a preset offset voltage effectively demodulates the ASK signal. With an effective die area of 0.7 mm² and power consumption of 107 µW, the standalone RFID/NFC frontend chip has the best figure-of-merits compared to the state-of-the-art frontend chips reported in the relevant literature. A passive RFID/NFC tag developed with the standalone frontend chip, as well as temperature and pressure sensors demonstrate the full passive operational capability of the frontend chip. An NFC reader device using a custom-built Android-based application software reads out the sensor data from the passive tag.
The sensor readout circuit consists of a channel selector with two differential and four single-ended inputs with a programmable-gain instrumentation amplifier. The entire sensor readout part remains deactivated when not in use. The internal memory stores the measured offset voltage of the instrumentation amplifier, where a firmware code removes the offset voltage from the measured sensor signal. A 12-bit successive approximation register (SAR) type analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) based on a charge redistribution architecture converts the measured sensor data to a digital value. The digital peripherals include a serial peripheral interface, four timers, RFID/NFC interfaces, sensor readout unit interfaces, and 12-bit SAR logic.
Two sets of studies with custom-made NFC tag antennas for biomedical applications were conducted to ascertain their compatibility with GAPSIC. The first study involved the link efficiency measurements of NFC tag antennas and an NFC reader antenna with porcine tissue. In a separate experiment, the effect of a ferrite compared to air core on the antenna-coupling factor was investigated. With the ferrite core, the coupling factor increased by four times.
Among the state-of-the-art SoCs published in recent scientific articles, GAPSIC is the only passive programmable SoC with a power management unit, an RFID/NFC communication interface, a sensor readout circuit, a 12-bit SAR ADC, and an integrated 32-bit microcontroller. This doctoral research includes the preliminary study of three passive RFID tags designed with discrete components for biomedical and industrial applications like measurements of temperature, pH, conductivity, and oxygen concentration, along with leakage detection in silicone breast implants. Besides its small size and low power consumption, GAPSIC is suitable for each of the biomedical and industrial applications mentioned above due to the integrated high-performance microcontroller, the robust programmable instrumentation amplifier, and the 12-bit analog-to-digital converter. Furthermore, the simulation and measurement data show that GAPSIC is well suited for the design of a passive tag to monitor arterial blood pressure in patients experiencing Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD), which is proposed in this doctoral thesis as an exemplary application of the developed system.
Due to its performance, the field of deep learning has gained a lot of attention, with neural networks succeeding in areas like Computer Vision (CV), Neural Language Processing (NLP), and Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, high accuracy comes at a computational cost as larger networks require longer training time and no longer fit onto a single GPU. To reduce training costs, researchers are looking into the dynamics of different optimizers, in order to find ways to make training more efficient. Resource requirements can be limited by reducing model size during training or designing more efficient models that improve accuracy without increasing network size.
This thesis combines eigenvalue computation and high-dimensional loss surface visualization to study different optimizers and deep neural network models. Eigenvectors of different eigenvalues are computed, and the loss landscape and optimizer trajectory are projected onto the plane spanned by those eigenvectors. A new parallelization method for the stochastic Lanczos method is introduced, resulting in faster computation and thus enabling high-resolution videos of the trajectory and secondorder information during neural network training. Additionally, the thesis presents the loss landscape between two minima along with the eigenvalue density spectrum at intermediate points for the first time.
Secondly, this thesis presents a regularization method for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that uses second-order information. The gradient during training is modified by subtracting the eigenvector direction of the biggest eigenvalue, preventing the network from falling into the steepest minima and avoiding mode collapse. The thesis also shows the full eigenvalue density spectra of GANs during training.
Thirdly, this thesis introduces ProxSGD, a proximal algorithm for neural network training that guarantees convergence to a stationary point and unifies multiple popular optimizers. Proximal gradients are used to find a closed-form solution to the problem of training neural networks with smooth and non-smooth regularizations, resulting in better sparsity and more efficient optimization. Experiments show that ProxSGD can find sparser networks while reaching the same accuracy as popular optimizers.
Lastly, this thesis unifies sparsity and neural architecture search (NAS) through the framework of group sparsity. Group sparsity is achieved through ℓ2,1-regularization during training, allowing for filter and operation pruning to reduce model size with minimal sacrifice in accuracy. By grouping multiple operations together, group sparsity can be used for NAS as well. This approach is shown to be more robust while still achieving competitive accuracies compared to state-of-the-art methods
Virtual-Reality
(2023)
Die Virtual-Reality (VR) Technologie ermöglicht Unternehmen eine Produktpräsentation, die weit über traditionelle Darstellungsmethoden hinausgeht. Obgleich die Integration der VR-Technologie für Unternehmen viele Chancen eröffnet, ist deren Einsatz auch mit Risiken verbunden. Insbesondere der Mangel an empirisch gesicherten Erkenntnissen zur Kundenakzeptanz, zu den Auswirkungen der Nutzung sowie zu Kannibalisierungseffekten ist ein wesentlicher Grund, der die Verbreitung von VR in der Kundenkommunikation noch hemmt. Das Buch adressiert diese Forschungslücken und identifiziert mittels eines nutzerzentrierten, quantitativen Forschungsdesigns konkrete Chancen und Risiken, die mit dem Einsatz von VR-Produktpräsentationen verbunden sind.
When people with hearing loss are provided with different devices in each ear, these devices usually have different processing latencies. This leads to static temporal offsets between both ears in the order of several milliseconds. This thesis measured effects of such offsets in stimulation timing on mechanisms of binaural hearing, such as sound localization and speech understanding in noise in hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners.
Metallische Gehäuse stellen eine große Herausforderung für die Schnittstelle von aktiven medizinischen Implantaten dar. Ihre elektrische Leitfähigkeit und die sich dadurch ergebenden Wirbelströme verhindern das Eindringen von hochfrequenten elektromagnetischen Wellen und Feldern. Aus diesem Grund werden die Antennen außerhalb des Gehäuses platziert. Niederfrequentere magnetische Felder dringen jedoch durch das metallische Gehäuse, wenn auch abgeschwächt. Damit kann eine induktive Kommunikation realisiert und so elektrische Durchführungen durch das ansonsten hermetisch dichte Gehäuse vermieden werden.
In dieser Arbeit wird die induktive Datenübertragung durch ein metallisches Gehäuse untersucht. Ein Modell wird entwickelt, das die Effekte des metallischen Gehäuses auf die Übertragung berücksichtigt. Hierzu werden in einem neuen Ansatz anhand von FEM Simulationen Korrekturfaktoren ermittelt. Diese Korrekturfaktoren können visualisiert und direkt auf die Auslegung der Antennenspulen angewendet werden. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Modellierungen werden nur frei zugängliche Software-Lösungen verwendet. Zudem werden die Feldverteilungen durch die im metallischen Gehäuse entstehenden Wirbelströme untersucht. Die unterschiedlichen Gehäuse- und Spulenparameter werden im Hinblick auf deren Einfluss auf das Übertragungsverhalten diskutiert, was in dieser Form bisher noch nicht veröffentlicht wurde. Das resultierende Modell kann auf unterschiedliche Ausführungen der metallischen Kapselung angepasst werden um damit die Grenzen und Einschränkungen unterschiedlicher metallischer Gehäuse-Materialien zu untersuchen.
Mit der Weiterentwicklung eines Transceivers, der mit 10 kBit/s bei 125 kHz Trägerfrequenz arbeitet, wird ein Übertragungsbaustein entwickelt, der mit herkömmlichen Mikrocontrollern verwendet werden kann. Der Transceiver wird in einem ASIC mit 32 Pin QFN-Gehäuse implementiert. Anschließend werden die Funktionalität überprüft und die elektrischen Eigenschaften im Hinblick auf Temperatur-, Spannungs- und Frequenz-Verhalten charakterisiert. Durch die geringe Stromaufnahme und die hohe Datenrate bei niedriger Trägerfrequenz eignet sich dieser Transceiver für Langzeitanwendungen in medizinischen Implantaten. Das Neue an dem Transceiver ist seine Einsatzfähigkeit für metallische Gehäuse, die wegen der schmalen Bandbreite mit \approx\unit[4]{kHz} eine effiziente Datenübertragung trotz hoher Dämpfung ermöglicht und darüber hinaus die frequenzabhängige Verzerrung der Impedanz- und Übertragungsparameter minimiert.
Anhand einer konkreten Anwendung für eine implantierbare steuerbare Infusionspumpe werden die gesamte Elektronik des Implantats sowie eines kleinen und ein großen Bediengerätes konzipiert, entwickelt, programmiert und erfolgreich in Betrieb genommen. Darin werden sowohl das induktive Übertragungsmodell als auch der Transceiver verwendet und somit deren Funktionalität und Einsatzfähigkeit demonstriert. Mithilfe dieser Entwicklung ist es möglich, über einen Abstand von 65 mm, die Dosierung eines Medikaments einzustellen und an den Tagesrhythmus der Patient*innen anzupassen sowie die Funktionalität des Implantats zu überprüfen. Aktuell gibt es auf dem Markt ein weiteres ähnliches Produkt, zu dem jedoch keine wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichungen vorliegen. Diese Arbeit liefert damit einen wissenschaftlichen Beitrag für die Entwicklung langlebiger metallisch gekapselter Implantate mit induktiver Schnittstelle.
Herzfehler sind weltweit die häufigste Form von angeborenen Organdefekten. In unterschiedlichen Studien wird die Inzidenz zumeist zwischen vier und elf von 1.000 Lebendgeburten angegeben (1–5). Im Rahmen der multizentrischen PAN-Studie (PAN: Prävalenz angeborener Herzfehler bei Neugeborenen), welche die Häufigkeit angeborener Herzfehler bei Neugeborenen in Deutschland zwischen Juli 2006 und Juni 2007 untersuchte, ergab sich eine Gesamtprävalenz von 107,6 pro 10.000 Lebendgeburten. Gegenstand dieser Arbeit sind Untersuchungen an Implantaten zur Behandlung von Atriumseptumdefekten (ASD). Vorhofseptumdefekte machen mit 17,0%, nach den Ventrikelseptumdefekten (VSD) mit 48,9%die zweithäufigste Art von Herzfehlern aus (6, 7).Als Vorhofseptumdefekte werden Öffnungen in der Scheidewand zwischen den Herzvorhöfen bezeichnet. Bei der Therapie eines ASD ist der minimalinvasive Verschluss mittels sogenannter Okkluder heute das Mittel der Wahl. Diese werden über einen femoralen Zugang im Rahmen einer Herzkatheteruntersuchung unter Ultraschallkontrolle und Durchleuchtung an die Implantationsstelle vorgeschoben und dort platziert(8). Die Okkluder bestehen in der Regel aus einem Drahtgeflecht aus Nitinol und haben die typische Form eines sogenannten Doppelschirmchens. Dabei weichen die unterschiedlichen Okkluder der einzelnen Firmen hinsichtlich Form und Beschaffenheit oft erheblich voneinander ab. Derzeit gibt es keine Untersuchungsmethode, die die auf dem Markt befindlichen Okkluder hinsichtlich ihrer mechanischen Eigenschaften vergleichbar macht. Diese Arbeit solleinen Beitrag erbringen, um grundlegende, die Okkludermodelle charakterisierende Parameter zu schaffen, um so deren interindividuelle Vergleichbarkeit zu ermöglichen. Hierzu werden in-vitro Messungen durchgeführt, welche geeignet sind das Verhalten der untersuchten Modelle unter unterschiedlichen Bedingungen und bei variierenden Defektgrößen zu charakterisieren.
The manufacturing of conventional electronics has become a highly complicated process, which requires intensive investment. In this context, printed electronics keeps attracting attention from both academia and industry. The primary reason is the simplification of the manufacturing process via additive printing technology such as ink-jet printing. Consequently, advantages are realized such as on-demand fabrication, minimal material waste and versatile choice of substrate materials. Central to the development of printed electronic circuits are printed transistors. Recently, metal oxide semiconductors such as indium oxide have become promising materials for the fabrication of printed transistors due to their high charge mobility. Furthermore, electrolyte-gating also provides benefits such as the low-voltage operation in sub-1 V regime due to the large gate capacitance provided by electrical double layers. This opens new possibilities to fabricate printed devices and circuits for niche applications.
To facilitate the design and fabrication of printed circuits, the development of compact models is necessary. However, most of the current works have focused on the study of the static behavior of transistors, while the in-depth understanding of other characteristics such as the dynamic or noise behavior is missing. To this end, the purpose of this work is the comprehensive study on capacitance and noise properties of inkjet-printed electrolyte-gated thin-film transistors (EGT) based on indium oxide semiconductors. Proper modeling approaches are also proposed to capture accurately the electrical behaviour, which can be further utilized to enable advanced analysis of digital, analog and mixed-signal circuits.
In this work, the capacitance of EGTs is characterized using voltage-dependent impedance spectroscopy. Intrinsic and extrinsic effects are carefully separated by using de-embedding test structures. Also, a dedicated equivalent circuit model is established to offer accurate simulations of the measured frequency response of the gate impedance. Based on that, it is revealed that top-gated EGTs have the potential to reach operation frequency in the kHz regime with proper optimizations of materials and printing process. Furthermore, a Meyer-like model is proposed to accurately capture the capacitance-voltage characteristics of the lumped terminal capacitance. Both parasitic and nonquasi-static effects are considered. This further enables the AC and transient analysis of complex circuits in circuit simulators.
Following, the study of noise properties in the field of printed electronics is conducted. Low-frequency noise of EGTs is characterized using a reliable experimental setup. By examining measured noise spectra of the drain current at various gate voltages, the number fluctuation with correlated mobility fluctuation has been determined as the primary noise mechanism. Based on that, normalized flat-band voltage noise can be determined as the key performance metrics, which is only 1.08 × 10−7 V^2 µm^2, significantly lower in comparison with other thin-film technologies, which are based on dielectric gating and semiconductors such as IZO and IGZO. A plausible reason could be the large gate capacitance offered by the electrical double layers. This renders EGT technology useful for low-noise and sensitive applications such as sensor periphery circuits.
Last but not least, various circuit designs based on EGT technology are proposed, including basic digital circuits such as inverters and ring oscillators. Their performance metrics such as the propagation delay and power consumption are extensively characterized. Also, the first design of a printed full-wave rectifier is presented by using diode-connected EGTs, which features near-zero threshold voltage. As a consequence, the presented rectifier can effectively process input voltage with a small amplitude of 100 mV and a cut-off frequency of 300 Hz, which is particularly attractive for the application domain of energy harvesting. Additionally, the previously established capacitance models are verified on those circuits, which provide a satisfactory agreement between the simulation and measurement data.
Printed electronics, due to its manufacturability using printing technology, allows for fabrication on large areas and the usage of flexible substrates and thus enables novel applications. Non-impact printing technology, such as inkjet-printing, permits for flexible, decentralized manufacturing of electronic devices and systems. This further facilitates split-manufacturing in security-critical electrical components, as well as a maximum in design flexibility in terms of free form factors and non-standardized structures with different geometrical sizes, reaching from a few micrometers up to several millimeters.
Based on the technological benefits printed electronics offers, it provides an interesting counterpart to classical silicon-based electronics, which is usually densely integrated on miniaturized, rigid areas. By utilizing both technologies in a complementary manner, novel systems in the form of hybrid systems can be enabled. Whilst hybrid systems, incorporating passive printed components and electrically conductive wiring concepts, are already commercialized, complex printed systems, which also utilize active components remain rare. To enable more complex (hybrid) systems, various building blocks are required. This includes possibilities for lightweight, printed data storage, the capability to provide sustainable, self-powered printed components and especially circuits for secure, unique identification for holistic printed systems, deployed in the internet of things.
The presented thesis focuses on inkjet-printed electronic devices, circuits and hybrid systems. It investigates solutions for current scientific questions in the area of efficient data storage, sustainable electronics and hardware-based security in printed electronics.
For data storage, an inkjet-printed memristor is developed. The device is fully electrically evaluated with a focus on its data storage capabilities. Furthermore, the printed device is of special interest due to its easy manufacturability and integration capabilities. The experimental analysis reveals that the developed memristor is highly suitable as lightweight non-volatile memory device.
In order to enable sustainable electronic systems, an inkjet-printed full-wave rectifier based on near-zero threshold voltage electrolyte-gated transistors is developed and fully electrically characterized. The circuit is capable for small alternating voltage rectification of low-frequency vibration energy harvesters in the sub-volt region. This provides an important building block in enabling sustainable, self-powered electronic systems. The inkjet-printed full-wave rectifier is evaluated by electrical simulation and experimentally.
To tackle hardware-based security for printed electronics, two implementations for inkjet-printed physically unclonable functions are developed and presented. For unique identification, intrinsic variation in active printed devices are exploited. One implementation is based on a crossbar architecture, incorporating integrable electrolyte-gated transistor cells. The second implementation, the so-called differential circuit physically unclonable function, is based on inverter structures, which provide the basis for unique response generation. Both physically unclonable functions are evaluated using an electrical simulation-based approach and experimentally. The differential circuit approach is furthermore fully integrated within a silicon-based electronic platform environment and serves as intrinsic variation source in a hybrid system. The hybrid system physically unclonable function is fully verified regarding performance metrics and is capable to generate highly unique responses for secure identification.
Im Jahre 2010 bot die Hochschule Offenburg ein Medizintechnikstudium mit dem Schwerpunkt ’Kardiologie, Elektrophysiologie und elektronische kardiologische Implantate’ als Bachelor- und später auch Masterstudiengang an. Ziel des auf diesen Schwerpunkt ausgelegten didaktischen Lehrkonzeptes ist die Vermittlung sofort anwendungsbereiten theoretischen Wissens und praktischen Könnens, welches die Absolventinnen und Absolventen in ihrer künftigen Berufsausübung in der Industrie oder als technische Partner der behandelnden Ärztinnen und Ärzte in hochspezialisierten klinischen Einrichtungen benötigen.
Aufgrund fehlender kommerzieller Angebote ist zur Umsetzung dieses Lehrkonzeptes die ingenieurtechnische Realisierung geeigneter Lehrmittel zwingend erforderlich. Dies betrifft die hard- und softwareseitige Erstellung visueller Demonstrationsmöglichkeiten für pathologische und implantatinduzierte Herzrhythmen, sowie die synthetische Bereitstellung originalgetreuer elektrokardiographischer Ableitsignale aus der klinischen Routine. Des Weiteren den Aufbau von in-vitro Trainingssystemen zu Therapien mit elektronischen kardiologischen Implantaten sowie zur Hochfrequenz-Katheterablation.
Insbesondere die Wahlfächer ’Programmierung von Herzschrittmachern’ und ‚Programmierung von Defibrillatoren’, deren Besuch den Teilnehmenden einen besonders raschen Berufseinstieg ermöglichen sollte, wurden in didaktischer Hinsicht in engem Bezug zum 4-Komponenten-Instruktionsdesign-Modell der Lehre gestaltet.
Durch den kontinuierlichen Einsatz der Instrumente der formativen Evaluation gelangen sowohl deutliche Verbesserungen am Gesamtkonzept der Lehrveranstaltungen als auch an den dort eingesetzten, selbst realisierten Lösungen des benannten speziellen Lehr- und Trainingsequipments.
Eine summative Evaluation des Lehrkonzeptes ist aufgrund seines Alleinstellungsmerkmals schwierig. Aus diesem Grund erschien die quantitative Prüfung des Einflusses eines Besuchs des praktisch orientierten Wahlfachs ’Programmierung von Herzschrittmachern’ auf die Note der kombinierten Abschlussklausur in den Fächern ’Elektrokardiographie’ und ’Elektrostimulation’ sinnvoll. In diese Evaluation eingeschlossen wurde eine Kohorte von 221 Studierenden, 76 Frauen und 145 Männer, von denen 93 am Wahlfach nicht teilnahmen und 128 die es besucht hatten.
Über 7 zusammengefasste Studienjahre zeigte sich, dass die praktische Ausbildung im Wahlfach ’Programmierung von Herzschrittmachern’ das Leistungsniveau der Studierenden der Medizintechnik in der kombinierten Abschlussprüfung ’Elektrokardiographie und Elektrostimulation’ deutlich beeinflusste.
Das im Rahmen dieser Arbeit mitgestaltete Lehrkonzept, die realisierten Lehrmaterialien und Lehrumgebungen wurden im Bachelor- und Masterstudiengang der Medizintechnik an der Hochschule Offenburg in den Praktika, Seminaren und Vorlesungen des Schwerpunktes ’Kardiologie, Elektrophysiologie und elektronische kardiologische Implantate’ vielfältig genutzt. Sie ermöglichten die Gestaltung interaktiver praktischer Weiterbildungsveranstaltungen für ärztliches und mittleres medizinisches Personal und für auf diesen Gebieten tätige medizintechnische Firmen.
Modern society is more than ever striving for digital connectivity -- everywhere and at any time, giving rise to megatrends such as the Internet of Things (IoT). Already today, 'things' communicate and interact autonomously with each other and are managed in networks. In the future, people, data, and things will be interlinked, which is also referred to as the Internet of Everything (IoE). Billions of devices will be ubiquitously present in our everyday environment and are being connected over the Internet.
As an emerging technology, printed electronics (PE) is a key enabler for the IoE offering novel device types with free form factors, new materials, and a wide range of substrates that can be flexible, transparent, as well as biodegradable. Furthermore, PE enables new degrees of freedom in circuit customizability, cost-efficiency as well as large-area fabrication at the point of use.
These unique features of PE complement conventional silicon-based technologies. Additive manufacturing processes enable the realization of many envisioned applications such as smart objects, flexible displays, wearables in health care, green electronics, to name but a few.
From the perspective of the IoE, interconnecting billions of heterogeneous devices and systems is one of the major challenges to be solved. Complex high-performance devices interact with highly specialized lightweight electronic devices, such as e.g. smartphones and smart sensors. Data is often measured, stored, and shared continuously with neighboring devices or in the cloud. Thereby, the abundance of data being collected and processed raises privacy and security concerns.
Conventional cryptographic operations are typically based on deterministic algorithms requiring high circuit and system complexity, which makes them unsuitable for lightweight devices.
Many applications do exist, where strong cryptographic operations are not required, such as e.g. in device identification and authentication. Thereby, the security level mainly depends on the quality of the entropy source and the trustworthiness of the derived keys. Statistical properties such as the uniqueness of the keys are of great importance to precisely distinguish between single entities.
In the past decades, hardware-intrinsic security, particularly physically unclonable functions (PUFs), gained a lot of attraction to provide security features for IoT devices. PUFs use their inherent variations to derive device-specific unique identifiers, comparable to fingerprints in biometry.
The potentials of this technology include the use of a true source of randomness, on demand key derivation, as well as inherent key storage.
Combining these potentials with the unique features of PE technology opens up new opportunities to bring security to lightweight electronic devices and systems. Although PE is still far from being matured and from being as reliable as silicon technology, in this thesis we show that PE-based PUFs are promising candidates to provide key derivation suitable for device identification in the IoE.
Thereby, this thesis is primarily concerned with the development, investigation, and assessment of PE-based PUFs to provide security functionalities to resource constrained printed devices and systems.
As a first contribution of this thesis, we introduce the scalable PE-based Differential Circuit PUF (DiffC-PUF) design to provide secure keys to be used in security applications for resource constrained printed devices. The DiffC-PUF is designed as a hybrid system architecture incorporating silicon-based and inkjet-printed components. We develop an embedded PUF platform to enable large-scale characterization of silicon and printed PUF cores.
In the second contribution of this thesis, we fabricate silicon PUF cores based on discrete components and perform statistical tests under realistic operating conditions. A comprehensive experimental analysis on the PUF security metrics is carried out. The results show that the silicon-based DiffC-PUF exhibits nearly ideal values for the uniqueness and reliability metrics. Furthermore, the identification capabilities of the DiffC-PUF are investigated and it is shown that additional post-processing can further improve the quality of the identification system.
In the third contribution of this thesis, we firstly introduce an evaluation workflow to simulate PE-based DiffC-PUFs, also called hybrid PUFs. Hereof, we introduce a Python-based simulation environment to investigate the characteristics and variations of printed PUF cores based on Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The simulation results show, that the security metrics to be expected from the fabricated devices are close to ideal at the best operating point.
Secondly, we employ fabricated printed PUF cores for statistical tests under varying operating conditions including variations in ambient temperature, relative humidity, and supply voltage. The evaluations of the uniqueness, bit aliasing, and uniformity metrics are in good agreement with the simulation results. The experimentally determined mean reliability value is relatively low, which can be explained by the missing passivation and encapsulation of the printed transistors. The investigation of the identification capabilities based on the raw PUF responses shows that the pure hybrid PUF is not suitable for cryptographic applications, but qualifies for device identification tasks.
The final contribution is to switch to the perspective of an attacker. To judge on the security capabilities of the hybrid PUF, a comprehensive security analysis in the manner of a cryptanalysis is performed. The analysis of the entropy of the hybrid PUF shows that its vulnerability against model-based attacks mainly depends on the selected challenge building method. Furthermore, an attack methodology is introduced to assess the performances of different mathematical cloning attacks on the basis of eavesdropped challenge-response pairs (CRPs). To clone the hybrid PUF, a sorting algorithm is introduced and compared with commonly used supervised machine learning (ML) classifiers including logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), as well as multi-layer perceptron (MLP).
The results show that the hybrid PUF is vulnerable against model-based attacks. The sorting algorithm benefits from shorter training times compared to the ML algorithms. If the eavesdropped CRPs are erroneous, the ML algorithms outperform the sorting algorithm.
Dissertation D. Dongol