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The smart way forward for microchips
A SELF-TIMED microchip has been developed by scientists in the United Kingdom, in a bid to make the use of smartcards more secure.
The SPA chip — developed by the Amulet group in the Department of Computer Science at Manchester University, northern England - dispenses with the global clock normally used in synchronous digital systems and instead relies on local interactions between circuit modules.
This results in lower power consumption than comparable synchronous designs and also in reduced correlation between circuit activity and electromagnetic and current emissions, making self-timed logic particularly applicable in secure systems such as smartcards.
The chip includes a self-timed implementation of the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, a novel on-chip interconnection system known as Chain, as well as standard memories and peripherals to make a complete smartcard chip. Containing in excess of 12 million transistors, the chip was fabricated on a 0.18 micron CMOS process. It represents the culmination of three years’ work from Amulet.
Results of preliminary experiments on the self-timed SPA chip suggest that it makes a significant contribution to reducing information leakage from the chip. This type of leakage has been used to “break into” smartcards in the past, allowing secret information such as bank and credit card personal identification numbers (PINs) to be retrieved.
Founded in 1990, the Amulet group has been at the forefront of self-timed research and development for over 12 years. Significant landmarks in the group's progress have been the Amulet series of ARM-compatible microprocessor cores, the Balsa synthesis system for self-timed logic and the Chain self-timed on-chip interconnect system for connecting together the components of a System-on-Chip. A spin-off company, Self-Timed Solutions, is expected to launch in 2003 to take some of the group's work into the commercial arena.
Amulet’s research formed part of the G3Card (www.g3card.org) project, a Europe-wide collaborative work investigating the use of self-timed (asynchronous) logic to improve the security of smartcards and similar secure devices. Project partners included ARM (UK), Gemplus (France), NDS (Israel), Cryptomathic (Denmark), University of Cambridge (UK) and the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). — Dawn/LPS Feature
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