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Platform project "Velektronik" aims to establish a one stop shop for solutions in the field of trustworthy electronics.
SIGN-HEP is live—our follow-on initiative to take VE-HEP’s open, trustworthy silicon from prototype to practical adoption.
SIGN-HEP picks up where VE-HEP (2021–2024) left off. With VE-HEP, we showed that open EDA and transparent methods can produce real, testable security silicon. With SIGN-HEP, we’re turning that proof into practice: maturing flows, strengthening hardening and verification, and delivering demonstrators that make open, trustworthy hardware easier to adopt.
VE-HEP (2021–2024): Trustworthy chips with open EDA—proved in silicon.
We demonstrated an open Hardware Security Module (HSM) flow—SpinalHDL → OpenROAD → KLayout—verified and brought to silicon at IHP (three tapeouts), with code, docs and demos openly available.
VE-HEP showed that an open toolchain can produce real, testable silicon for security-critical applications. We completed three tapeouts, built an FPGA rapid-prototyping path, and published the VE-HEP HSM RTL/FW so others can reproduce our steps. Start with the GitHub repo, then explore the requirements report, posters and talks on the Project subpage.
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From our press release of April 2021:
Secure and sovereign: Open-source processor designs boosted by new HEP project delivering free verification tools
Security chips are essential for many providers of electronic devices, from small personal devices to automobiles. They perform cryptographic operations and are intended to prevent manipulations, malfunctions or accidents. These chips should be open, flexibly adaptable and, as far as possible, mathematically proven to be secure. For global value chains with numerous actors, the supply of such cost-efficient components represents a great challenge. Open source processors offer a versatile alternative, as long as their security can be guaranteed via circuit design tools (EDA - Electronic Design Automation). A joint research project is working on this, dubbed “Hardening the value chain through open source, trustworthy EDA tools and processors (HEP)”, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the “Trustworthy Electronics” initiative. [more]