Author's Latest Posts


Securing AI Silicon


The importance of security in AI training/inference silicon is increasing in awareness. Over the past several months, I’ve noticed many questions in common from various parts of the microelectronic industry. In this blog post, I’ll share my thoughts on some of these most frequently asked questions. Firstly, people often ask if securing AI silicon is different from securing other types of... » read more

Protecting Chiplet Architectures With Hardware Security


Chiplets are gaining significant traction as they provide compelling benefits for advancing semiconductor performance, costs, and time to market. With Moore’s Law slowing, building more powerful chips translates into building bigger chips. But with chip dimensions pushing up against reticle limits, growing the size of chips is increasingly impractical. Chiplets offer a new path forward by dis... » read more

Scaling Anti-Tamper Protection To Meet Escalating Threats


Anti-tamper tends to be one of those catchall phrases encompassing any countermeasure on a security chip. A more precise definition would be that anti-tamper protection is any collection of countermeasures that serves to thwart an adversary’s attempt to monitor or affect the correct operation of a chip or a security core within a chip. Given that, it can be useful to think about a hierarchy o... » read more

Putting A Hardware Root-of-Trust To Work In An Anti-Counterfeiting IC


An anti-counterfeiting security IC is conceptually rather simple: during manufacture, it is securely programmed with some secret data. Then during operation, it can prove to a verifying host that it knows that secret data. This “proof of knowledge” is often all that can be expected of a low-cost security IC. This prove-you-know-the-secret authentication process between the security IC an... » read more