Pat Hays, VP of the Acalis Business Unit, CPU Tech

We recently posted a press release for CPU Tech in Pleasanton California that caught my eye.

Their new Acalis CPU872 chip designed to protect on board software systems ensuring that no Trojan Horse or other malicious circuit has been inserted into the chip during any phase of design or fabrication interested me.

In an effort to understand how this technology was being used to protect packages and circuits I was ableto speak with Pat Hayes, VP of the Acalis business Unit at CPU to learn how this unique product fit into the future of commercial electronics manufacturing.

His answers were enlightening and I am happy to share them with you.

Circuitnet: Pat, where does a product like Acalis fit into the Electronics Manufacturing Supply Chain?

Pat Hayes: Acalis is a new secure dual-core PowerPC integrated circuit for the embedded computing market. It offers a new opportunity for system architects, hardware designers, and board designers to design a secure embedded computing platform into their systems, or to add security and authentication to an existing system. By utilizing the IBM Trusted Foundry, we not only ensure a secure manufacturing process, but a long term supply as well.

Circuitnet: How does a manufacturer benefit from implementation of these devices, I understand the military and security industry issues, but is there a benefit for a company manufacturing consumer devices like notebooks and PC's?

Pat Hayes: The threats addressed by the Acalis secure embedded processor include counterfeiting, reverse engineering, and loss of sensitive data. Where these are extremely important concerns for military and industrial security customers, counterfeiting and cloning is beginning to have a negativeaffect onconsumer markets as well.

Circuitnet: Will consumers or businesses be creating a demand for this kind of system level protection, if not then what products would benefit from this kind of protection?

Pat Hayes: The unfortunate fact of the security business is that demand is often driven by security incidents, data loss, and the threats of system intrusion and device cloning.

Based on recent events, we expect to see interest in hardware/ software security solutions beyond the military in government networks and data entrysystems that include the up coming census, social security, medicare, the digitization of medical records and diagnoses, and point-of-purchase hardware debit card terminals, ATM machines, self-checkout, gaming machines, and bar-code scanning are all areas that will benefit from the Acalis program.

Circuitnet: Data security seems to be a growing concern in the business world, have you got any numbers on how big the demand currently is and what it is projected to be in the next five or ten years. Can you predict what the annual number of PCB's that would include these devices in their bill of materials would be?

Pat Hayes: Where the size of the electronics security market is often quoted in the billions of dollars looking forward, we estimate as much as $600 million per year on 'secure embedded processing' by 2011.

Because there are a variety of single-chip, multi-chip, software, and integrated solutions available, we believe there will be several distinct gradients of security requirements for system developers. We believe that ‘all of them’ will start to include some level of on boardsecurity and anti-counterfeiting consideration.

Thanks for answering these questions, if any of ourreaders need further information click on Acalis, to be directed to the CPU tech web site.