Platform Chips Special Session at the „IEEE Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference“

This special session sponsored by Chipdesign Germany will focus on Platform Chip designs. Within this context it will also highlight the growing importance of trustworthiness for future embedded systems.

With the ongoing digitization of products, the importance of embedded systems is rapidly increasing. These powerful integrated electronic solutions are crucial for driving autonomous cars, home robotics (e.g., vacuum cleaners), and medical devices (e.g., hearing aids and pacemakers). Embedded systems provide core functionality, integrate essential intellectual property, and form the backbone of future “hub and spoke” system architectures. They handle massive sensing, processing, and communication tasks, including vision, acoustics, and motion control. The key to effective integration is designing “Platform Chips” that serve as the hub of these embedded systems.

Designing individual ASICs for such a diverse range of devices is economically impractical. Thus, the future lies in “Platform Chips” that can accommodate multiple use cases with a single design.

A crucial aspect of these Platform Chips is their trustworthiness, as they form the intelligence core of future systems. Trustworthiness, defined as ‘working-as-expected’, encompasses numerous functional and non-functional security and safety properties necessary to ensure efficient operation, liveness, isolation, and interference-free execution of applications. This also involves certifying that hardware and software are unmodified, free from trojans, functionally correct, and deadlock-free.

To achieve demonstrably trustworthy systems, the entire stack—from the application layer down to the hardware—must be involved. Security properties essential for trustworthiness must be rooted in the hardware and propagated upwards. Key topics include cross-cutting functionality for hosting diverse applications, application isolation, trusted execution environments (TEEs), root-of-trust (RoT), remote attestation, reliability, real-time guarantees, and interference-free on-chip communication.