Infineon releases new embedded secure elements for mobile devices and wearables

Infineon Technologies AG introduced embedded security controllers for premium smartphones and wearables at Mobile World Congress 2015.

As part of the SOLID FLASH-based SLE 97 family, the new Infineon products provide a memory capacity of up to 1.5MB and are available with ultra-small packages.

The new products address new functionalities in mobile devices and wearables, such as fingerprint authentication and NFC-based online payments, which require a higher memory capacity to securely store biometric data or encryption keys on the security controller.

Infineon has also extended its chip scale package technology to high-end security controllers, providing a solution which is significantly smaller than the standard surface mounted device packages.

Infineon is currently shipping embedded secure elements with ultra-small packages in volume quantities to a few leading smartphone manufacturers to be integrated into their new smart devices.

By combining the smallest PCB footprints and the flexibility of high-end security controllers, system designers and equipment manufacturers are able to effectively address new markets such as 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 is designed to achieve maximum performance and provide a high level of security to address the high-end universal integrated circuit card and the embedded secure element markets.

The new security controllers come equipped with 1.5MB and 1.3MB, with both products based on an Infineon security chip architecture that uses an ARM SecurCore SC300 enhanced by Infineon’s cache and SOLID FLASH technology.

Standard features such as 32KB RAM and crypto-coprocessors for both symmetric and asymmetric keys are available on all platforms, while an additional 2kByte of internal cache helps increase the system performance to accomodate demanding applications such as fingerprint match-on-card.

The backward compatibility to the existing SLE 97 products allows developers to seamlessly and affordably migrate to the new platform.

All SLE 97 security controllers come equipped with single-wire-protocol and an ISO7816 interface.

Select products also feature SPI and I²C interfaces for special use cases, while all products come in different form factors.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Infineon  |  mobile  |  secure element  |  security  |  wearables