Date: 15/11/2010

Atmel unveils open source license AES-128 immobilizer protocol stack

Atmel Corporation has released a complete immobilizer protocol stack, based on the AES-128 cryptography standard, under an open source license. ATMEL says it is the industry's first to deliver this open source immobilizer protocol stack.

"By offering open source capabilities, a variety of semiconductor manufacturers, tier1 suppliers and car manufacturers can now contribute to improve the protocol while maintaining interoperability between suppliers," said Nicolas Schieli, senior marketing manager for car access products, Atmel Corporation. "Even more, additional features can be added by other corporate contributors to address application-specific requirements under the same license terms. Atmel continues to find innovative solutions to help the entire supply chain to bring their products faster-to-market."

Atmel says AES-128 immobilizer protocol stack is the first open source stack to allow interoperability between different semiconductor vendors.

The immobilizer protocol stack defines all necessary layers from the physical level to the AES crypto-engine on a key fob and base-station devices. The physical layer is based on FDX (Full-Duplex) which is widely used by all established IC manufacturers for backward compatibility.

Authentication scheme (single or mutual authentication), challenge and response lengths, data rate and modulation, number of secret keys, AES computation time can all be configured to allow optimal turn-around time versus minimum coupling factor for a given application.

KPIT Cummins, a global product engineering solutions supplier with CMMi and Automotive SPICE development processes, provides a production-ready implementation of this protocol for all new Atmel RKE/ PEG device families released 2010.