Optima Launches High-Performance, Pre-Silicon Semiconductor Security Verification Solution

NAZARETH, ISRAEL, June 30, 2022 — Optima Design Automation, a leader in next-generation functional safety and IC-security verification, today announced its new hardware security verification solution, Optima-SEC™. Optima-SEC™ enables the high-performance pre-silicon verification of fault injection attacks and certifies the counter-measures adopted against such attacks that target the extraction of secret information from semiconductors leveraging side-channel effects. Optima-SEC™ to be showcased at the Design Automation Conference (DAC59 – 2022).

Optima-SEC™ is a next-generation platform for IC-Security countermeasure verification and vulnerability analysis. With Optima-SEC™, security verification is highly automated and accelerated during silicon development prior to fabrication. Today most security verification is performed after silicon fabrication,  late in the semiconductor design cycle, which results in low visibility and high-costs for correcting vulnerabilities.

“Security verification is performed post-silicon mostly because mechanisms that can effectively verify security vulnerabilities and execute fault attack simulation at the RTL level do not exist or are extremely slow,” noted Jamil R. Mazzawi, President and CEO of Optima Design Automation. “Optima-SEC provides a specialized layer on top of high-performance fault-simulation that allows the modeling of any type of security attacks. Built-in models for laser-attack and EM-attack are also provided for expedited testing.”

Semiconductor designers plan and implement countermeasures to avoid leakage of sensitive information due to malicious attacks. These countermeasures are notoriously difficult to test due to the number of permutations of potential attack strategies. Optima-SEC™ enables development teams to verify these countermeasures early in the design process at the Register Transfer Level (RTL) to avoid costly, late-stage redesign and development. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) of proposed fault attacks are simulated and verified automatically using exhaustive, automated techniques leading to a high confidence level of design invulnerability. By leveraging Optima’s high performance fault simulation technology, this process can be performance quickly and efficiently, saving a considerable amount of development time.

“Optima-SEC™ is based on Optima’s patented Fault Injection Engine (FIE) technology, providing orders of magnitude faster fault-simulation,” noted Sesha Sai Kumar C V, Applications Engineering Director. “FIE, originally developed for functional safety analysis, has also proven highly effective for Security Fault-Attack-Simulation (FAS) to verify security vulnerabilities extremely quickly.”

Availability and Pricing

Optima-SEC™ is available today. Pricing is available upon request.

Optima-SEC Paper and Demonstrations at the Design Automation Conference

Sesha Sai Kumar of Optima will present the paper “Verifying Security Countermeasures for side channel fault attacks, in an Integrated Circuit at RTL or Gate level, using Fault Attack Simulation (FAS)” on Tuesday, 12^th July 2022, which will include practical use cases of the new Optima-SEC™ technology.

Optima will also be showing live demonstrations of Optima-SEC™ as well as its range of functional safety products on its booth number 2457 throughout the conference.

About Optima Design Automation
Optima Design Automation is the pioneer of next-generation fault analysis for automotive functional safety and IC-Security verification. The company’s product portfolio of automated solutions targets specific fault conditions, accelerating fault simulation stipulated by the ISO 26262 standard by orders of magnitude and enabling a dramatic increase in analysis coverage and ultimate device quality. Optima partners with leading automotive semiconductor vendors and EDA tool providers to create complete solutions that shorten safety-critical device time-to-market. The company is privately held and is based in Nazareth, Israel. For more information, please visit Optima-DA.com.

Anastasiya Sasnakevich

Anastasiya Sasnakevich is a digital marketing specialist with over 5 years’ of international experience. Having worked in different fields, Anastasiya found herself in automotive semiconductor industry where she has been working for almost 2 years. She holds Master Degree in International Business and Economics from BFSU, Beijing, and an MBA in Digital Marketing and Business from EFAP, Paris.