Atmel Announces AT88SA Family of Lowest Cost, Ultra Low Power and Secure Cryptographic Authentication ICs

Atmel’s AT88SA devices are the industry’s most secure authentication ICs, with an embedded SHA-256 engine. The 256-bit cryptographic key size allows more possible keys than there are atoms in the sun, making it essentially impossible to crack using brute force methods. In contrast, the nearest competing authentication IC has a key size of only half the bits. The AT88SA102S (first device in the family) is a general purpose CryptoAuthentication™ IC designed to protect consumers from counterfeit electronic and medical consumables, such as batteries, ink cartridges, test strips, blood bags, breathing tubes, and others. They can be used to secure network transmissions such as satellite radio broadcasts or medical records or any other kind of logical data such as firmware or media…