Microstructured Interconnections for High Security Systems

In many applications, the concept of taking two die from different technologies to create a complete system can be more cost effective than trying to integrate the two components together on the same substrate. There are economies of scale associated with this approach which enable volume production of such systems to be proposed for the future, particularly in areas where low cost and security is of paramount importance. This concept is very attractive for applications such as smart cards where special crypto processor chips need to be manufactured to ensure that as many as possible security features that are needed for the application are present on board the device. These can be expensive to design and build and no matter what security aspects are put in place on chip, hackers can find a way to extract some of the information from the system. A novel approach to building in security to these systems is proposed in this paper.