The US Department of War (DoW) selected BAE Systems to qualify a new generation of integrated circuits using 12nm technology, which will be radiation hardened and available to the space community to address future high-performance requirements.

“Our RH12 Storefront provides a turnkey solution for customers requiring radiation-hardened 12 nanometer integrated circuits,” said Joe Dziezynski, director of Space Systems at BAE Systems. “This approach uses commercial foundry technology for space missions, qualifying not only the library components but also the process for how each of those components are designed into customer integrated circuits. Customers now have a one-stop-shop for state-of-the-art microelectronics performance to complete their missions in the harsh space environment.”

For the RH12 Storefront program, Rambus supplies BAE Systems with solutions from our industry-leading Silicon IP portfolio including DDR4 memory and PCIe controllers. The move to 12nm technology has a pronounced positive impact on the power and performance of space-based systems, and Rambus is proud to support this mission-critical endeavor. BAE Systems offers RH12 integrated circuit development and production services to the industry for use in defense, space, intelligence, research and commercial space missions.

View the BAE Systems press release for more details.

One limitation of these fault-injection attacks is that the lasers employed use the infrared spectrum, which is transparent to silicon but absorbed by the ordinary metal used for circuit-interconnect and power distribution. For that reason, fault-injection attacks typically assault a circuit from the back, substrate-side of the chip, where there is typically no metallization. Scott Best will present a reliable, low-cost anti-tamper technique that adds fault-injection shielding metal to the reverse-side of a chip. The proposed techniques utilize modern packaging technology that is fully compatible with and non-disruptive to all semiconductor wafer-processing foundries.

Also at the conference, Rambus will be highlighting two new products aimed at serving the mission-critical requirements of defense applications. The first is the Root of Trust RT-1660, a fully programmable, FIPS 140-2 and FIPS 140-3 compliant root-of-security core offering security by design for U.S. Defense applications. The RT-1660 protects against a wide range of hardware and software attacks with state-of-the-art anti-tamper security techniques. The RT-1660 offers superior tamper resistance through the implementation of Differential Power Analysis (DPA) countermeasures and advanced fault injection attack (FIA) protections.

In addition, Rambus will showcase a new Inline Memory Encryption (IME) Engine. The IME Engine protects critical data with just-in-time encryption, decryption and authentication for all memory read and write requests between a host processor and its attached DRAM memory. This new Rambus product offering was developed and marketed as the “Immunity IME” by Idaho Scientific, a long-term technology partner with Rambus in the U.S. Defense community.

Here’s a much more sobering fact: earlier this decade, the Senate Armed Services Committee found over 1,800 cases where counterfeit electronic components were introduced into U.S. military hardware, including airplanes, helicopters and missiles. Let’s be clear about what that means; in each of those cases, a semiconductor of unknown origin, of dubious quality, and operating in a manner which cannot be assessed found its way into equipment used by our servicemen and women. This is not only an immediate risk to the health and safety of our troops, but also a potential significant security threat.

To be clear: Not all counterfeit semiconductors are the product of nefarious parties. Some are simply “recovered” from scrap stock, while others are removed from older circuit boards and reworked to look new. However, there is no real way to know this. While some may be the product of a party simply trying to reuse discarded stock, many of the counterfeit semiconductors are in fact manufactured to look and function like the real thing…but why? Further clarity: Like counterfeit consumer goods, it’s often impossible to visually determine if a semiconductor is authentic or not.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. There are ways to help address this issue. Rambus has recently released a white paper on this topic, where we explore the topic of how to combat counterfeit semiconductors in the military supply chain. Specifically, we address:

• The magnitude of the problem of counterfeit chips in the military supply chain?
• How and why are chips counterfeited?
• Why is the defense market in particular so susceptible to counterfeiting?
• The consequences of an unsecured supply chain
• How our CryptoManager Infrastructure and CryptoManager Root of Trust can help address this growing threat

The white paper is free to download. Click here for access.