Electronics you can trust

Projects for the development of functionally secure and trusted integrated circuits and systems

 

or electronics to be reliable, it is becoming increasingly vital to protect them from outside attacks. To this end, the providers and integrators of microelectronics need to be able to trace their manufacture and inspect their functions.

“Trusted electronics and data security are the basis for all digital, connected systems – especially for the Internet of Things, but for AI too,” says Prof. Albert Heuberger, Executive Director of Fraunhofer IIS. As such, trusted computing comprises not only tamper-proof hardware and reliable software, but begins with secure semiconductor production, continues with non-readable memory contents and secure computer identities, and ends with secure embedded systems.

Fraunhofer IIS is helping establish the Fraunhofer Center for Trusted Electronics as part of the High-Tech Agenda of the Bavarian State Government. At the Engineering of Adaptive Systems division EAS, moreover, we are working on various projects within the German flagship “Trusted Electronics” initiative.

Here, we want to explore questions such as how hardware can be transformed from an Achilles heel into a bedrock of trustworthiness, through suitable planning at the design stage of the electronics at the architecture level and making sure this is implemented for all subcomponents. We also want to help protect intellectual property along the value chain of microelectronic components and systems by means of innovative methods in design and testing.

The projects benefit from our expertise in the field of design methods for safe and reliable integrated circuits and systems, which includes our know-how in areas such as grey box verification and the development of a trustworthy design process for the automotive sector. On top of this, we contribute our know-how in the area of IC design flow.

Not only are we thus developing a design process for distributed production, but by facilitating the independent manufacture of individual system components we are also protecting intellectual property in general.