Chips Based on Silicon-on-insulator Technology Meet the Tough Performance and Security Requirements Presented by Smart Cards. a Test Chip Manufactured in a Fully Depleted Soi Process Incorporates a Charge Pump

Smart cards have been commercial products for 15 years, but they have only found use in a broad range of applications in the past few years. Most early applications, such as prepaid phone cards, used memory cards with access logic. Adding a CPU to the card enhanced the security and paved the way for more possibilities: subscriber identification module (SIM) cards in cellular phones, banking cards, and electronic social-security cards. New services that require secure transactions will reach the market soon; these include payment systems for online transactions and subscription TV. The huge progress in both VLSI technology and cryptography makes this explosion of applications possible. Smart cards can securely process information from the very moment they incorporate a CPU or cryptoprocessor to execute the cryptographic algorithms. Today the manufacturers of smart-card chips use a bulk CMOS process, but it is reaching its limit. Pushing the technology further gives lower performance gains than those predicted by Moore’s law, so the industry is investigating alternative technologies. Among those, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) seems promising as a near-term replacement for bulk CMOS in high-performance, low-power, low-voltage VLSI circuits. For 20 years, SOI remained in research labs and specific niche applications, like high-temperature and radiation-hardened circuits. But today, SOI high-performance circuits are commercially available, and many semiconductor companies have announced new SOI products. One smart card manufacturer has already announced it will use SOI for its future smart cards.