MUNICH, Germany — Infineon Technologies AG has signed a licence agreement with microprocessor IP vendor ARM. The Munich-based chip maker plans to use the ARM architecture in a new family of high-security chip cards aimed at multimedia applications.
The license agreement refers to the ARMv6M and ARMv7M 32-bit architectures. The move is intended to enable Infineon to integrate its proprietary security features into ARMs widespread CPU core implementation. At the same time, the chip vendor hopes to benefit from ARMs existing development and software ecosystem. A prerequisite to this end is that Infineon will leave the processors' instruction set unchanged.
With the move Infineon becomes ARMs first licensee targeting at security applications. The first product resulting out of the partnership will target the multimedia SIM market. This product can be expected in the second half of 2011, Infineon announced.
"We will create proprietary security cores which combine our security features with the specific benefits of the ARM architecture, offering high performance, low power and the ARM ecosystem," explained Helmut Gassel, president of Infineon's Chip Card & Security Division.
Infineons plans include the intention to integrate its 'Integrity Guard' hardware which encrypts data across most parts of the physical chip implementation such as data buses and all memories including EEPROM, Flash, ROM and RAM, as well as caches. This integration however is scheduled for a later point in time.
In a separate move, Infineon announced at the Cartes trade fair in Paris the launch of a highly secure product family incorporating the company's proprietary Integrity Guard hardware. This chip card microcontroller product family, dubbed SLE 78CL aims at government identification applications such as contactless electronic passports as well as at contactless payment solutions.
One of the security features of the SLE 78CL is that the two computing cores of the devices are used to constantly monitor each other in order to detect errors and, first of all, attempts of an attack.
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