Developing, deploying and operating trusted electronics in Europe is a prerequisite for Europe’s technological sovereignty and foundation for secure and trustworthy applications of all kinds.
The supply chains of electronics involve a large number of specialised partners around the world and contain a large number of steps from specification, over design, manufacturing and assembly to operation and end of life.
Typical issues that hinder the adoption of trusted electronics are an increased complexity, implementation overhead, verification overhead, compatibility, lack of specialised expertise, gap between research and real-world products, availability of design tools, incorporating trust into the supply chain, access to technology and conflicts in regulatory compliance.
Even if trusted electronics rarely contributes new features to a product, intrinsic and extrinsic market drivers motivate companies to increase the trustworthiness of their devices and systems. To fulfil the market drivers, requirements need to be met by these technologies and products.
Examples of technologies that can lead to more trusted electronics:
- Secure Designs cover topics such as open-source hardware, and in particular RISC-V, roots of trust / secure elements, cryptographic implementations, and integration technologies such as chiplets and advanced heterogeneous integration.
- Supply chain security requires a chain of trust, cross-manufacturer trustworthiness, and technologies for counterfeit detection, mitigation and fingerprinting.
- Analysis also plays a critical role for trusted electronics and requires research on metrics for trustworthiness, test, analysis and verification during design, manufacturing, operation and post-mortem, verification through open-source electronic design automation, and digital twins.
- Cross-technical challenges complement the technical ones such that, involvement of real world products and training and teaching also play a critical role for the deployment of trusted electronics.
The opportunity to establish a dedicated program for trusted electronics holds the potential to attract specific funding for initiatives in this field, enabling focused efforts towards securing and advancing trusted electronic technologies.
Initiatives supporting bottom-up and broad activities are a first step but require more specific funding for fundamental research and the transfer into the applications with a focus on real-world applications. In addition, trusted electronics can only be achieved in depth and breadth when the research is accompanied by training and teaching programmes and, most importantly, followed up by companies deploying and using the technology and methods in large scale.
Strengthening the European design and manufacturing ecosystem through the European Chips Act is an important step towards European technological sovereignty. However, complementing this effort and improving the trustworthiness of electronics beyond existing standards will benefit from dedicated security-focused funding.
Read more about: