1999-06-07 , E/IC-1068/35
Business News From Philips Semiconductors

Philips Semiconductors, Europe's leading semiconductor manufacturer, and ODS Landis & Gyr, a leading international smart card manufacturer, announced today that the German Central Credit Control Committee of Banks (Zentraler Kreditausschuß, ZKA) has approved the hardware/software combination based on the new P8WE5032 high security crypto controller for the Geldkarte project. GeldKarte is currently the most widely used electronic purse in Germany and winning this approval is further endorsement of Philips Semiconductors' leadership in functional capability and confirms its commitment to providing solutions with the highest level of security.

"With this approval Philips Semiconductors is proud to offer the first smart card controller fully hardware-resistant against recent threats. We have achieved this through sophisticated and dedicated chip design based on leading edge 0.35 µm process technology and our experience in high security products", comments Alexander Harrer, product line manager Chip Card ICs at Philips Semiconductors.

"As one of the main suppliers of the German eurocheque card with chip, ODS Landis & Gyr has gained a long-term expertise in the field of mask development. This know-how enabled us to perfectly integrate the excellent hardware features of the Philips Semiconductors' WE controller into our high-performance GeldKarte operating system", says André Laux, Managing Director of ODS Landis & Gyr.

In the first quarter of 1999, Philips Semiconductors introduced the WE range, the world's first smart card controller family based on 8-inch wafers with 0.35 µm feature size. It is targeted at high security applications in banking, GSM and Pay-TV.

The WE family features a triple-DES coprocessor which reduces execution times considerably, enabling a triple-DES operation to be completed in less than 110µs. As a result, the overall time required for a triple-DES operation within a transaction can be reduced by a factor of up to 400. For cryptographic key generation, Philips Semiconductors' FIPS 140-1 evaluated True Random Number Generator (TRNG) is also available on all products in this new smart card controller family. The WE-Family can also offer Philips Semiconductors' 32-bit FameX crypto coprocessor for public key encryption.

Based on the  80C51 architecture, the new smart card controller range has twice the core speed of the current family and offers significantly enhanced security features. The fully dedicated architecture design, together with Philips Semiconductors' fully automated unique chip layout process (glue logic), provide the highest possible level of resistance to known attacks. A new dynamic memory protection concept also prevents data stored in the memory being read by sophisticated visual inspection techniques.

ODS Landis & Gyr is a leading manufacturer of smart cards for applications in banking, contactless products & identification as well as telecommunications. The company is based in Ismaning, near Munich, with a card production facility located in Seebach (Thuringia, Germany). In addition to card production, ODS Landis & Gyr offers a full service including consultancy, project management, software development, design, personalisation and lettershop. The in-house module production guarantees flexiblity in chip supplies. ODS Landis & Gyr is a subsidiary of Landis & Gyr Communications, Geneva, world-wide market leader in payphone technology.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the eighth largest semiconductor supplier in the world. Philips Semiconductors is a leader with a proven reputation in the development and production of high security smart card controllers and contactless smart card ICs as well as in components for radio frequency identification. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by regional application labs. Additional information on Philips Semiconductors can be obtained by accessing its home page at http://www.semiconductors.philips.com