The widespread nature and continuous increase of networked systems that form the Internet of Things (IoT) have allowed engineers to bring about previously impossible speed increases, reliability improvements, and better data collection abilities to the electronics industry. But these innovations have also opened the door to a whole new world of exploits and vulnerabilities with the potential to cause chaos on a massive scale. Flash memory for critical systems and infrastructure that is placed outside of a processor is especially vulnerable and often more prone to attacks.
To address this problem, Infineon Technologies has added Semper Secure to its Semper NOR Flash memory platform. Semper Secure serves as a hardware root of trust to provide end-to-end protection for the NOR Flash series.
According to Sam Geha, president of memory solutions at Infineon, “As systems increasingly rely on external flash to protect code and data in connected systems, the need for added advanced cryptographic security in memory is growing. Our Semper Secure Flash architecture adds to the already most functionally safe Semper products a secure subsystem to enable end-to-end persistent protection and ensure that a system is never compromised.”
The Semper Secure Flash family includes AEC-Q100 automotive-qualified devices with a temperature range of –40°C to 125°C and supports 1.8-V and 3.0-V operating ranges. The devices are available in densities of 128Mb, 256Mb and 512Mb.
Infineon’s Semper Secure Flash also features the company’s EnduraFlex architecture, which helps simplify system design by optimizing for high endurance or long data retention partitions. Combined with the Quad Serial Peripheral Interface (QSPI), Octal SPI and HyperBus interface, Semper Secure Flash provides a read bandwidth of up to 400MBps.
The Octal SPI and HyperBus interface devices are compliant with the JEDEC eXpanded SPI (xSPI) standard for high-speed NOR Flash and offer much needed protection against the digital bandits lingering on the fringes of the IoT.