CRISP

Project Description

This project was funded by the European Community under the program of ESPRIT IV and started in 1996. The consortium consists of GIS (General Information Systems, Cambridge UK), DigiCash (Amsterdam NL), Inside Technologies (Aix en Provence, F), and the Institute for Applied Information Processing (IAIK, Graz A) of the Graz University of Technology. CRISP is a follow-on project of the ESPRIT III funded project SOScard. The objectives of CRISP are:

• To provide an OMI macrocell by refining and enhancing the SOScard design and functionality on the basis of experience to date and market requirements
• To design and build a smartcard IC of minimum silicon area for the highest level of security and card functionality incorporating the CRISP architecture.
• To design and implement state-of-the-art development tools and supporting software.
• To validate security and trial technology within other research projects.

The Institute for Applied Information Processing has designed, built, and optimized the Cryptographic Logic Unit (CLU) for this project. The CLU is a full-custom scalable VLSI-macrocell design for cryptographic functions, symmetric as well as asymmetric. The CLU may be incorporated in other silicon design and is available with a broad spectrum of interfacing options, such as OMI's PI-bus, PCMCIA, and a variety of custom interfaces. In particular, we want to point your attention to the OMI Crypto Unit Macrocell which may be used in embedded systems as a crypto co-processor. The CLU has been designed with the low power budget of smartcards in mind. But, due to the scalability of the design it easily copes with other power, speed, and area tradeoff requirements.