The first memory solution to combine security and functional safety in a single NOR Flash device has earned Infineon Infineon’s Semper Secure NOR Flash an Embedded Computing LEAP Award.

LEAP Awards honor innovative products across 12 categories. More than 100 entrants were received for the annual competition which celebrates the most innovative and forward-thinking products serving the design engineering space. This year’s winners were chosen by an independent judging panel of 12 engineering and academic professionals.

Semper Secure is the first memory solution to combine security and functional safety in a single NOR Flash device, delivering the security, safety, and reliability required for the most advanced connected automotive, industrial, and communications systems. The proliferation of connected systems is driving the need for ever greater system security. Semper Secure NOR Flash provides a trusted solution to protect critical system information in the most demanding environments. Having a secured Flash memory device is especially important when it is placed outside of a processor, making it more vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Semper Secure is the only NOR Flash solution that serves as a hardware root-of-trust to provide end-to-end security and OTA updates secured from cloud to device.

The Semper Secure NOR Flash family includes AEC-Q100 automotive-qualified devices with an extended temperature range of -40 °C to +125 °C, supports 1.8-V and 3.0-V operating ranges, and is available in densities of 128 Mb, 256 Mb and 512 Mb. Semper Secure NOR Flash is designed to the ISO 26262 standard and is ASIL-B compliant and ready to be used in systems up to ASIL-D. Infineon’s endurance flex architecture simplifies system design by enabling optimization for high endurance or long data retention partitions. The devices are offered with Quad SPI, Octal SPI and HYPERBUS™ interfaces. The Octal and HYPERBUS interface devices are compliant with the JEDEC eXpanded SPI (xSPI) standard for high-speed x8 serial NOR Flash and offer a read bandwidth of up to 400 MBps.

“Having a secured connected system is a top priority for customers focused on protecting information and maintaining system integrity,” said Sam Geha, Head of Infineon Technologies LLC Memory Solutions. “As systems increasingly rely on external NOR Flash to protect code and data in connected systems, the need for added advanced cryptographic security in memory is growing. Our Semper Secure NOR Flash architecture adds to the already most functionally safe Semper products a secure subsystem to enable end-to-end persistent protection and efficiently protect a system from being compromised.”