Tortuga Logic to Work With Ansys for Phase III SBIR Contract

Tortuga Logic, a cybersecurity company headquartered in San Jose, California, has received a $12M SBIR Phase III contract to develop the latest hardware security solutions.

Ansys, a software organization based in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, will collaborate on the deal to enhance side-channel leakage analysis workflow, Intelligence Community News reported Monday.

Andreas Kuehlmann, Tortuga Logic executive chair and CEO, said software security has been the industry’s priority for the past 10 years and most of the efforts have been focused on solutions to improve software applications.

“The more recent emergence of hardware security vulnerabilities threatens the very foundation of our computing infrastructure,” he said.

According to Joe Cole, vice president for the federal aerospace and defense business at Ansys, hardware security draws considerable attention from government agencies such as the Department of Defense, the defense industrial base, and private sector companies in the telecommunications, automotive and smart card industries.

“Ansys’ state-of-the-art semiconductor solutions deliver calculable metrics to effectively measure and predict side-channel emissions during a chip’s design phase, significantly de-risking the chance of physical probing by an adversary after a chip is manufactured,” Cole said. “With Ansys, Tortuga Logic can enhance trustworthiness and security during the development process and beyond.”

For Tortuga Logic founder and Chief Technology Officer Jason Oberg, the contract signifies the commitment of the national government to improve hardware security for microelectronics.

“The award will allow us to rapidly expand our solution to address new classes of hardware weaknesses in the physical domain that are critical to the security of both our government and commercial customers,” he said.

Established in 2014, Tortuga Logic offers products and services that address hardware security issues and challenges. Its leading product line, Radix, is a vital component of a pre-silicon secure hardware development life cycle in which security signoff is required before building the device.