With new chip-based software, Nortel enables a cheaper semiconductordevice to perform the function of a small Internet router, supplanting costly hardware of the sort Cisco sells.
"Once you move to a semiconductordevice, obviously taking advantage of Moore's Law"--that you can double the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months--"things get cheaper and they become ubiquitous, " he says.
PUFs are an innovative way of safeguarding individual chips from data theft by using the unique 'fingerprint' inherent in every semiconductordevice to protect its encryption key, making it very hard to clone and thus reverse-engineer and compromise security microcontrollers.