Agile Analog and Silex Insight form partnership to offer combined analog and digital IP solutions to provide advanced security and protection against side-channel attacks (SCA) for chip manufacturers

Agile Analog, a supplier of highly configurable process node-agnostic analog IP building blocks, today agreed a partnership arrangement with Belgium-based Silex Insight under which the two companies will jointly market combined analog and digital IP solutions to offer enhanced security solutions for customers’ ASIC and SoC developments.

Agile Analog has developed a technology, the COMPOSA system, which generates configurable analog IP optimised to a customer’s specification within weeks, for any foundry and node. In addition to data conversion, power management and sensing, it also provides security and protection against side-channel attacks (SCA) and tampering through an array of configurable sensors that detect temperature shocks; supply voltage changes/glitches; and clock manipulation. On the other hand, Silex Insight offers digital security IP cores – (i.e. Root-of-Trust / eSecure), that are scalable and flexible. The features include secure boot, system integrity by ensuring execution of authenticated software, device authentication, cryptographic acceleration, and generation and storage of secure keys and secret information. This combined offering from Agile Analog and Silex Insight can be tuned to each specific solution, offering advanced security and protection.

The partnership agreement means that the companies will collaborate to provide integrated analog and digital solutions for customers building ASICs or SoCs. This will enable chip developers and chip manufacturers to accelerate the development process while achieving better design outcomes:

• By procuring integrated analog and digital IP solutions for complete functional blocks, manufacturers can spend less time and use less die area on the interfaces between analog and digital blocks

• This partnership gives chip manufacturers a single supplier interface, reducing vendor count and facilitating the resolution of IP implementation problems

John Hartley, Chief Commercial Officer at Agile Analog, said, ‘Resource and time constraints mean that chip manufacturers are continually looking for new ways to reduce development bottlenecks and to focus internal resources on the most crucial elements of a design. By procuring an integrated solution from a combined Agile Analog and Silex Insights unit, they can offload complete functional blocks to proven domain experts, and free their developers to focus on their area of core competence.’

Michel Van Maercke, Chief Executive Officer at Silex Insight, said, ‘The combination of Agile Analog and Silex Insight is going to bring a high-level security capability to SoCs for any process node. Like Agile Analog, our mission is to give customers IP which perfectly fits their specification, and which offers outstanding quality, so that it is easy to implement right through to tape-out.’

Agile Analog and Silex Insight have already delivered combined solutions to several customers, and more are in the pipeline. The benefit is that both Agile Analog and Silex Insight generate custom IP optimised to the customer’s application, foundry and node, so jointly developed mixed-signal systems will give chip manufacturers superior results in terms of power, speed, area, or any other chosen parameter.

About Agile Analog

Analog IP needs to be different for each design. That is why Agile Analog has made a new way of doing things, conceived by some of the best minds in the industry. We provide a wide range of analog IP that is customised to your needs quickly, to a higher quality, and on any semiconductor process. Contact us at www.agileanalog.com to find out more.

About Silex Insight

Silex Insight is a recognized market-leading independent supplier of Security IP solutions for embedded systems and custom OEM solutions for AVoIP/Video IP codec. The security platforms and solutions from Silex Insight include flexible and high-performance crypto engines which are easy to integrate and an eSecure IP module that provides a complete security solution for all platforms. For custom OEM solutions for AVoIP/Video IP codec, Silex Insight provides high-end image and video compression solutions for distributing low latency, 4K HDR video over IP. Development take place at the headquarters near Brussels, Belgium.

For more information, please visit www.silexinsight.com or follow Silex Insight on LinkedIN.