Event Date
Abstract:
Over the past decade, the concept of non-Hermitian physics and its unusual singularities, known as exceptional points (EPs), have deepen understanding of engineering spectral/spatial/temporal properties of waves, enabling new applications in signal generation, routing, and sensing across the spectrum. In this talk, I will first review the non-Hermitian physics and parity-time reversal (PT) symmetry, and their potential applications. Then, I will present a new concept of leveraging the unprecedented sensitivity and high entropy near EPs and other types of singular points in non-Hermitian systems to implement physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as hardware security primitives. I will provide an overview of our recent findings on PUFs generated from non-Hermitian electronic circuits and optical systems, with experimental evidence. I will show that the proposed PUFs can be lightweight, low-cost and robust against machine learning-based modeling attacks, enabling various unforeseen cryptographic applications, such as RF and optical fingerprinting, anticounterfeiting labels, and secure wireless communications.
Bio:
Dr. Pai-Yen Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and both M.S. and B.S. degree from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He was a Research Staff with the Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute (TSRI), from 2006-2009. He has been involved in multidisciplinary research on electromagnetics, RF devices and circuits, wireless micro/nano-sensors and integrated systems, plasmonics, nanophotonics, nano-optics, and quantum engineering. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, SPIE Rising Researcher Award, IEEE Sensors Council Young Professional Award, IEEE Raj Mittra Travel Grant (RMTG) Award, ACES Early Career Award, URSI Young Scientist Award, Donald Harrington Fellowship, and several best paper awards from IEEE flagship conferences. He currently serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Sensors Journal, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, and IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology (IEEE-JERM), and is Guest Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Sensors.