Some of the information in the article may be a little bit misleading (what one person says, the second understands and the third person translates from german into english...;-) ). So let me try to clarify some things:
1. We (or Alcatel) are currently not planning any high-volume fabrication of the chip. What the students have designed until now is a gate-level netlist based on an Alcatel standard cell technology. The design is now being simulated thoroughly. The next step may be to get a few prototypes fabricated for educational and research purposes.
2. The Intel 80286 processor has got 134,000 transistors (not gates!). The crypto chip has got a complexity of about 100,000 gates which corresponds to approximately 400,000-450,000 transistors. This number is comparable to the Intel 80386 processor (275,000 transistors).
Some remarks on/answers to previously asked questions:
- The estimated size of the chip is 10mm.
- The DES part is in fact optimzed for en-/decryption and not for crunching keys: DES keys are loaded using RSA encryption which is comparably slow.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the information in the article may be a little bit misleading (what one person says, the second understands and the third person translates from german into english... ;-) ). So let me try to clarify some things:
1. We (or Alcatel) are currently not planning any high-volume fabrication of the chip. What the students have designed until now is a gate-level netlist based on an Alcatel standard cell technology. The design is now being simulated thoroughly. The next step may be to get a few prototypes fabricated for educational and research purposes.
2. The Intel 80286 processor has got 134,000 transistors (not gates!). The crypto chip has got a complexity of about 100,000 gates which corresponds to approximately 400,000-450,000 transistors. This number is comparable to the Intel 80386 processor (275,000 transistors).
Some remarks on/answers to previously asked questions:
- The estimated size of the chip is 10mm.
- The DES part is in fact optimzed for en-/decryption and not for crunching keys: DES keys are loaded using RSA encryption which is comparably slow.
Gundolf Kiefer