Microchip — DesignShield Security Protection Tool

Microchip has extended the security protection for the PolarFire^® family of FPGAs with the DesignShield development tool, which helps to prevent Critical Program Information (CPI) from being extracted from FPGAs for malicious purposes.

The threats to mission-critical and other high-assurance systems deployed worldwide from cybercriminals are rapidly evolving. Manufacturers of these systems are looking for the strongest possible protection for CPI assets stored on the FPGAs which power them.

The new DesignShield tool from Microchip raises the barriers against cyber-attacks and reduces the risk of cloning, intellectual property theft, reverse engineering, or the insertion of malicious Trojan Horses. By deploying DesignShield on a PolarFire FPGA or the PolarFire SoC, a device manufacturer can ensure that deployed systems behave as intended, and are safe from counterfeiters and their threat to a developer’s design investments and brand reputation.

The DesignShield tool protects aerospace, defense, and other high-assurance systems from cybercriminals who try to acquire an FPGA’s bitstream from a system deployed in the field.

The tool deters reverse-engineering of the bitstream, which can often include CPI, by obscuring its logical equivalent using a combination of logic- and routing-based encryption techniques. This improves design security and integrity while reducing the risk of system corruption. It also lessens the chance that custom code, intellectual property, or information critical to national security are used by non-authorized agents. 

The DesignShield tool is part of Microchip’s Libero development tool suite.