Infineon Introduces embedded Secure Elements for Advanced Mobile Communications
Infineon Technologies AG has announced its new embedded security controllers for premium handsets and smart wearables at Mobile World Congress 2015. The new members of the SOLID FLASH-based SLE 97 product family provide industry's highest memory capacity of up to 1.5MByte and are available with ultra-small packages. New functionalities require memory capacity to securely store biometric data or encryption keys on the security controller: these include e.g. fingerprint authentication enabling FIDO ( Fast IDentity Online), secured cloud services, NFC-based applications or advanced online payment.
Furthermore, Infineon has extended its Chip Scale Package (CSP) technology to high-end security controllers, providing a package solution which is considerably smaller than the standard SMD (Surface mounted device) packages. As an industry first, Infineon is already shipping embedded Secure Elements with ultra-small packages in volume quantities to several leading handset manufacturers for their new smart devices.
The combination of both "“ smallest PCB footprints and the flexibility of high-end security controllers "“ enables system designers as well as equipment manufacturers to address new markets such as smart wearables.
"Embedded Security builds a rock-solid foundation for the next-generation smartphones and mobile applications," says Juergen Spaenkuch, Head of Platform Security at Infineon Technologies. "We enable various players in the mobile ecosystem to differentiate themselves from their competitors by realizing unique yet highly secured mobile solutions based on the new SLE 97 security controllers."
The SLE 97 security controller family has explicitly been developed for the maximum performance and for high security to address the high-end UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) and the embedded Secure Element markets. The product family has now been extended by adding security controllers with 1.5MByte and 1.3MByte memory density. Both products are based on an Infineon security chip architecture utilizing an ARM SecurCore SC300 enhanced by Infineon's cache and SOLID FLASH technology. Standard features such as 32kByte RAM and Crypto-coprocessors for both symmetric and asymmetric keys are available on all platforms. An additional 2kByte of internal cache boosts the system performance, which allows the designers to address even the most demanding applications such as fingerprint match-on-card. The backward compatibility to the existing SLE 97 products allows an easy migration to this new platform and thus lowers development costs.
All SLE 97 security controllers feature a Single-Wire-Protocol (SWP), and an ISO7816 interface. In addition, SPI and I²C interfaces are available on selected products to realize innovative use cases. All products are available in different form factors.
