Security
With the rapid rise of IoT and AI, security has become a critical concern.
The foundation of information security lies in three principles:
Confidentiality
protecting data from unauthorized access
Integrity
ensuring data remains accurate and unaltered
Availability
keeping systems and data accessible to authorized users
To uphold these, modern security solutions integrate cryptography, access control, and hashing algorithms.
Security Technologies
A reliable hardware root of trust ensures:
- Confidentiality - Data stays private
- Integrity - Data remains unchanged
- Authenticity - Devices are verified
- Non-repudiation - Actions can’t be denied
For AI, IoT, automotive, and more, chip-level security offers stronger, more reliable protection.
Unclonable Random Number Seeds
A PUF (Physically Unclonable Function) acts as a unique silicon fingerprint, generated from natural variations in chip manufacturing. It enables secure key generation for authentication, digital signatures, and secure boot.
Unlike traditional HSMs that require cleanrooms and external storage, PUFs generate and store secrets directly on-chip — reducing cost and complexity while enhancing security.
Flexible Integration
Security isn’t one-size-fits-all — a smart band and an autonomous vehicle demand very different levels of protection.Our solutions offer flexible combinations of secret key generation, crypto engines, and TRNGs to meet diverse protocol and system needs.
They’re also easy to adopt across various foundries and process nodes, streamlining integration for any chip design.
Hardware Security
Compared with software-based security measures, hardware solutions can provide a more solid security boundary against hostile attacks. Nowadays, more people are talking about hardware root of trust-based security protections for devices that they’ve spent huge amounts of time and human resources to create.
Hardware security provides faster response time, less vulnerability and simpler protection than a software approach.
Unclonable Random Number Seeds
A PUF (physical unclonable function) is an inherent physically-defined "silicon fingerprint" that is generated along with random nano-scale variations in the manufacturing process of a semiconductor, providing true uniqueness in every chip that is virtually impossible to duplicate. By using this incredible IC fingerprint, chip and system makers can use a PUF to generate a secret number for various security functions like ID creation, authentication, digital signatures, root of trust and secure booting.
Traditionally, the secret number of an IC has been assigned by an outside hardware security module (HSM) in a highly secure cleanroom and stored in embedded non-volatile memories (NVMs) like NeoFuse. The new trend is to replace outside HSMs with the internal PUF on a chip to eliminate the high maintenance cost of a secure cleanroom facility, as well as the logistical complications of managing secure chip stocks. Moreover, the PUF solution can provide significant security improvements compared with the use of an HSM.
Flexible Integration
Security is not an all-or-nothing choice. It should be a range of options for different scenarios and communication protocols. The security demands for a wearable smart band are not the same as those in an autonomous vehicle. Likewise, the communications protocols in a smartphone are not the same as those in an narrowband-IoT device. So security solutions should have sufficient flexibility -- including secret numbers, crypto-engines, and random number generation sources -- for different products and still provide a simple process for adoption in a range of foundries and process nodes.
Hardware Security
Compared with software-based security measures, hardware solutions can provide a more solid security boundary against hostile attacks. Nowadays, more people are talking about hardware root of trust-based security protections for devices that they’ve spent huge amounts of time and human resources to create. Hardware security provides faster response time, less vulnerability and simpler protection than a software approach.
Explore our solutions
As embedded hardware security become more important in this connected world, we expect PUF-based security solutions to be widely adopted in various applications. PUFsecurity, the subsidiary of eMemory, offers PUF-based security IP solutions developed from eMemory’s two core IPs: NeoPUF and NeoFuse. PUFsecurity’s comprehensive security IP solutions help our partners easily integrate security functions, accelerate time-to-market and implement hardware root-of-trust in networking related applications.
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