Infineon received the Innovation Award of German Industry for the best technological innovation. In the category of large-scale enterprises the prestigious award went to Infineon’s “Integrity Guard” security technology. This marked the third time Infineon has received this accolade. No other company in Germany has won the award more times in the last ten years than Infineon. Peter Bauer, CEO of Infineon Technologies AG, was presented the award by Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, the Germany Federal Minister of Education and Research.
Infineon developed the security technology “Integrity Guard” to deliver an especially high level of long-lasting protection for sensitive data in applications such as credit cards and electronic government identification documents, e.g. passports or ID cards. Conventional security chips will soon no longer live up to the demands of these applications. While they store data in encrypted form, the data is decrypted for processing and that exposes it to hacker attacks.
With “Integrity Guard” sensitive information remains encrypted during transmission and processing. Even if data might be intercepted, the encrypted signals are of no use to eavesdropping hackers. In addition to full on-chip encryption along the entire data path (CPUs, EEPROM, Flash, ROM and RAM, caches and buses), Infineon’s security chips with “Integrity Guard” have two central processing units (CPUs) and a sophisticated error detection system.
The two CPUs cross-check each other continuously and detect whether arithmetic operations are executed correctly or an attack has been launched. If the security controller detects an error or an attempted attack, protective action is taken. The respective operation is aborted, for example. The SLE 78 product family using the “Integrity Guard” security technology received all important certifications necessary for use in government and payment applications.
The Germany Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) certified the high standard of security achieved by Infineon and granted the internationally recognized EAL 5+ (high) certificate according to the Common Criteria Scheme. For use in payment cards, SLE 78 products received approvals according to the international standard EMVCo (Europay International, Mastercard, Visa) and the German payment scheme ZKA (Zentraler Kreditausschuss).
According to the latest study of October 2010 by market research company Frost & Sullivan, Infineon held a 27 percent share of the US Dollar 1.76 billion world market for chip card ICs in 2009.
Developments for “Integrity Guard” were sponsored by the Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The “Integrity Guard” was invented in Munich, Germany. SLE 78 products with “Integrity Guard” were mainly developed in Munich and Graz, Austria. The SLE 78 chips are produced in Dresden, Germany, and are planned to be manufactured also in Burlington, Vermont, USA.
Infineon received the Innovation Award of German Industry in 2001 and 2008 for contributions to energy efficiency and mobility The Innovation Award of German Industry has been conferred since 1980. The award annually honors the nation’s three outstanding scientific and technical achievements in the categories of large-scale enterprises, medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.
