Infineon's Security Microcontrollers Received Sesame Award for Best Hardware Innovation

(Business News & Technology News, 5 Nov 2008)

The chip card industry has selected Infineon Technologies AG's latest 16-bit security microcontroller family SLE 78 as the winner of the 2008 Sesames Award in the category of Best Hardware. This is the fifth time Infineon has received a Sesame Award for Best Hardware Innovation; and this year, two out of the three Best Hardware finalists were Infineon prod-ucts. The other Infineon nominated product is the SLM 76 security microcontroller family targeted at the growing market of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

Infineon's SLE 78 family of security microcontrollers integrate highly innovative self-checking security mechanisms—called "Integrity Guard"—that Infineon specifically developed for chip card and security applications. With the new "Integrity Guard", security microcontrollers are equipped with full on-chip encryption and full error-detection capabilities over the core architecture, including all memories (EEPROM, ROM, RAM), buses, caches and the two CPUs, leaving no plain data on the chip. Also, the dual CPU approach that uses hardware-encrypted calculation with different secret keys allows detecting whether a calculation was performed without errors. After detecting an error or the attempt of an attack, the microcontroller can decide whether the operation is continued or an alarm is to be triggered and the operation automatically to be stopped.

Sesames Awards honor outstanding innovation in the chip card industry. All Sesames Awards, now in their thirteenth year, honor outstanding innovations and application achievements within the chip card industry and are regarded as global standards for card manufacturers and related industries. An international panel of judges active in the chip card industry selected the individual recipients from a total of 211 companies that applied for the ten Sesames Awards. Winners are recognized in several categories including "Best Hardware", "Best Software" and "Best Application" in eight application areas. The judges selected the Infineon 16-bit security microcon-troller family SLE 78 out of 60 applications in the "Best Hardware" category. This category looks for the best and most innovative chip, card, token, electronic component, terminal, reader, manufacturing/printing material, representing a genuine breakthrough in the card industry.

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