At IDEMIA, our chip design expertise dates back more than 10 years and our experts have, on average, more than 15 years of microelectronics experience. We not only design chips, but we also industrialize them—working closely with contract foundries to ensure sourcing and monitor integrated circuit quality from the prototype to the chip production.

We develop secure chips (certified common criteria EAL6+ and EMVCO) built by different blocks:

- A MicroController Unit (MCU) that manages the execution of the secure element software, assisted by a co-processor dedicated to cryptography acceleration

- The Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) that stores secrets, the OS and applets

- Analog/Radio Frequency blocks that power the integrated circuit, manage communication interfaces and secure other functions

Combining our in-house chip design and industrialization know-how with our unique software expertise is a true differentiator: this synergy allows us to create secure elements that are truly adapted to our clients’ mission-critical applications—providing the highest security platform as well as optimized performance in terms of memory, power usage and communication interfaces for operating systems, applications and the management of secure credentials.

These secure elements perfectly merge our latest advancements in hardware and software security for all our markets, from SIM technology used in the consumer space and in various IoT markets, to contact and contactless payment products, ID cards or passports equipped with a chip.