Table of Contents:

• • About BOS Semiconductors
  • Target Markets
  • Eagle-N: A Breakthrough in Automotive AI
  • Why Hardware Security Matters
  • Rambus RT-640: ASIL-B Certified Security for Eagle-N
  • The Strategic Impact
  • Summary

About BOS Semiconductors

Founded in 2022, BOS Semiconductors—short for Best of Silicon—is a global fabless semiconductor company headquartered in South Korea. Its mission is to drive mobility innovation through differentiated semiconductor technology, focusing on:

• Technology Excellence: Advanced chiplet-based SoCs for automotive and robotics.
• Distinguished Creativity: Reimagining mobility with modular, scalable architectures.
• Safety and Reliability: Meeting stringent automotive standards for functional safety and cybersecurity.

Target Markets

BOS primarily serves:

• Automotive ADAS and IVI systems – enabling real-time AI processing for safety and immersive experiences.
• Autonomous driving platforms – delivering scalable compute for Level 2+ autonomy.
• Robotics and intelligent spaces – extending AI acceleration beyond vehicles into drones and industrial automation.

Eagle-N: A Breakthrough in Automotive AI

The Eagle-N chiplet SoC, is designed to meet the growing compute demands of modern vehicles:

• Performance: Up to 250 TOPS (INT8) NPU performance, scalable to 2,000+ TOPS.
• Architecture: Chiplet-based design for modularity and cost efficiency
• Interfaces: PCIe Gen5 and UCIe for seamless integration with existing ADAS and IVI processors.
• Safety: ISO 26262 ASIL-B compliance and AEC-Q100 Grade 2 qualification.
• Security: Built-in hardware virtualization and security engine.

This architecture allows OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers to add AI acceleration without redesigning entire systems, reducing cost and time-to-market.

Why Hardware Security Matters

As vehicles become software-defined and connected, cybersecurity is no longer optional—it’s a core safety requirement. Two critical standards govern this domain:

• ISO 26262: Functional safety for electrical/electronic systems, defining Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs).
• ISO/SAE 21434: Cybersecurity engineering for road vehicles, addressing threats across the entire lifecycle.

Failure to comply can lead to catastrophic risks—from system malfunctions to remote cyberattacks that compromise steering or braking. For chipmakers, this means embedding security by design at the silicon level.

Rambus RT-640: ASIL-B Certified Security for Eagle-N

To meet these stringent requirements, BOS integrates Rambus RT-640, an automotive-grade Embedded HSM that provides:

• Root-of-Trust security: providing system wide Root-of-Trust based security functionality such as secure boot, debug and firmware update, key management and protection, attestation, SKU and feature management, cryptographic acceleration.  
• ASIL-B Certification: TÜV-SGS certified per ISO 26262, ensuring functional safety.
• Cryptographic Strength: Hardware accelerators for AES, RSA, ECC, HMAC-SHA-2, and NIST-compliant random number generation.
• Fault Protection: Detects ≥90% single-point faults and ≥60% latent faults, meeting ASIL-B metrics.
• Secure Boot & Key Management: Guarantees that only authenticated software runs on the SoC.
• Anti-Tamper Mechanisms: Protects against physical and side-channel attacks.

This integration ensures Eagle-N delivers robust AI performance with uncompromising security, enabling OEMs to comply with global safety and cybersecurity regulations.

The Strategic Impact

The BOS-Rambus collaboration sets a new benchmark for automotive silicon:

• For OEMs and Tier-1s: Accelerates deployment of advanced AI features while meeting ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434 compliance.
• For Consumers: Safer, smarter, and more secure vehicles—paving the way for autonomous mobility.
• For the Industry: Demonstrates how chiplet architectures and hardware-rooted security can coexist to deliver scalable, future-ready solutions.

Conclusion

As the automotive world continues toward autonomy and connectivity, performance without security is no longer acceptable. BOS Semiconductors’ Eagle-N, fortified by Rambus RT-640, exemplifies the fusion of high-performance AI and ASIL-B certified security—a critical foundation for the next generation of vehicles.

Anti-tamper sensors are an essential tool among several defenses used to protect against these security threats. By continuously monitoring for abnormal environmental or electrical conditions, anti-tamper sensors help ensure that when a device is touched, opened, glitched, or zapped, your security stack knows and reacts to protect your system.

The Modern Tamper Landscape

Today’s adversaries use voltage glitching to skip instructions, clock manipulation to desynchronize logic, and electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) to flip bits at precise moments. They may also use strong magnets or environmental shifts to blind sensors or disrupt measurements, especially in metering and industrial systems.

Why does this matter? Because hardware secrets (keys, certificates) underpin secure boot, encrypted communications, and software trust. Physical compromise of just one device can open a backdoor to a much larger network if unique per device protections and real-time tamper responses aren’t in place.

The Top Customer Pain Points

From conversations with SoC designers, several recurring challenges emerge:

1. Evolving attack techniques
   Digital-only countermeasures often miss analog domain faults like voltage, clock, and EMFI attacks. Teams need diverse, low latency sensors that can spot subtle, nanosecond scale anomalies before damage is done.
2. Integration across process nodes and foundries
   Analog IP is traditionally process specific, making portability painful when supply constraints or costs push a design to another process node or foundry. Reengineering slows releases and consumes scarce analog engineering talent.
3. Tuning and false positives and negatives
   Tamper sensors must be sensitive without being noisy. Poor thresholding or inadequate environmental compensation can trigger needless shutdowns, or worse, miss an actual attack. Getting that balance right demands robust IP and good system architecture
4. Compliance pressure
   Regulations and certifications (e.g., FIPS 140-3 Level 3 and 4, Common Criteria High Assurance Levels, SESIP L3, ISO 21434) add requirements for key protection,  tamper responses, and secure boot. Meeting them while hitting power, area, and schedule targets is hard.

What a “Good” system Looks Like: Principles of Anti-tamper by Design

A resilient anti-tamper strategy embraces sensor diversity, secure event handling, and automated responses:

• Multi‑modal sensing (voltage, clock, temperature, magnetic/EMFI) to detect a broad spectrum of physical attacks.
• Secure response paths anchored in a hardware Root of Trust (RoT)—so detected events can trigger policy-driven actions like key zeroization, boot lockdown, or secure telemetry, even if an application code is compromised.
• Per device uniqueness (unique keys, secure provisioning) to contain the blast radius if one unit falls into the wrong hands.

This is where Agile Analog and Rambus complement each other.

Agile Analog: Deep Tamper Detection + Prevention in the Analog Domain

Agile Analog’s agileSecure portfolio brings a comprehensive, customizable set of tamper detection IP to protect SoCs on advanced process nodes:

• agileVGLITCH – Voltage Glitch Detector: Detects nanosecond scale supply anomalies used in instruction skipping and bypass attacks.
• agileCAM – Clock Attack Monitor: Catches clock frequency shifts, holds, and glitches with programmable thresholds.
• agileTSENSE_D – Digital Temperature Sensor: Monitors abnormal thermal profiles indicative of physical interference or environmental manipulation.
• agileEMSensor – EMFI Detector: Detects electromagnetic fault injection, one of the hardest physical attack vectors to counter with digital logic alone.

Beyond tamper detection, Agile Analog’s agileSecure also offers tamper prevention IP—internally biased LDOs, bandgap references, oscillators, power-on reset and power-OK blocks—to isolate and harden critical circuits against external manipulation.

Why customers choose Agile Analog

• Process portability and time-to-market: Their digitally wrapped, process agnostic, fully verified approach helps teams seamlessly integrate analog IP blocks like digital IP, reducing re-spins across nodes/foundries and speeding SoC schedules.
• Standards alignment: Deployments are increasingly aligned with FIPS 140‑3 and Common Criteria requirements—critical for regulated markets.
• Proven on advanced process nodes: Recent deliveries include TSMC N4P engagements with a tier1 U.S. customer, underscoring maturity on cutting-edge processes.

Rambus: Hardware Root of Trust, Anti-tamper, and QuantumSafe Security

While Agile Analog monitors and hardens the physical attack surface, Rambus provides the secure control plane that decides what to do when tampering is detected.

The CryptoManager Security IP family spans Root of Trust (RoT), Hub, and Core offerings, delivering progressively higher levels of functionality and integration:

• Hardware RoT with secure boot, secure storage, and policy driven tamper responses—available from compact state machines to programmable secure coprocessors.
• Quantum‑Safe boot flow and crypto accelerators to protect against future quantum compute threats while meeting today’s performance needs.
• DPA/FIA countermeasures to resist power analysis and fault injection at the cryptographic core, complementing analog tamper detection located next to critical circuitry.
• Inline memory encryption and protocol engines (MACsec/IPsec/TLS) to protect data in use and in motion, completing a holistic data‑centric security posture.

With support for FIPS, SESIP, PSA Certified, and ISO 21434, CryptoManager solutions help teams accelerate certification and ship faster into regulated markets like automotive and data centers.

Mapping Pain Points to the Joint Solution

Implementation Checklist: Getting It Right the First Time

1. Threat model by device class. Map likely physical attacks (serviceable vs. sealed units, field vs. factory) and decide which sensors you need (voltage, clock, temp, EMFI) for layered coverage.
2. Place sensors near assets. Position voltage and clock monitors on relevant domains and route signals securely to the RoT—short paths, shielded where practical.
3. Calibrate and test. Use built-in programmability to tune thresholds across PVT corners. Run fault injection tests (voltage glitches, clock glitches, EMFI) pre and post silicon to validate coverage and false positive rates.
4. Provision uniquely, attest continuously. Unique keys and attestation to prevent a single device compromise from scaling to a fleet.
5. Plan for updates. As attacks evolve, update RoT policies and, where applicable, firmware to refine responses without re-spinning silicon.

Real‑World Momentum

Agile Analog has announced deliveries of its agileSecure anti-tamper suite—including EMFI sensing—to tier1 customers on TSMC N4P, reflecting demand for robust analog security IP on advanced process nodes. As well as tamper detection IP, the portfolio also includes tamper prevention IP (LDOs, bandgaps, POR/POK) to harden critical circuits against manipulation. In parallel, Rambus introduced its nextgen CryptoManager Security IP with a three-tier architecture, QuantumSafe boot, and a broad certification roadmap—aimed squarely at data center, AI, automotive, and high assurance SoCs.

The Bottom Line

Anti-tamper sensors are non-negotiable in a world where physical attacks are mainstream. But sensors alone aren’t enough. You need a secure control plane that can decide and act, anchored in hardware, with the independent analysis that certifications bring and countermeasures to withstand both today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

• Agile Analog delivers highly configurable analog tamper detection and tamper prevention IP — portable across processes, tuned for advanced nodes, and designed to spot the faults attackers rely on.
• Rambus provides the Root of Trust and cryptographic backbone—with anti-tamper hardening, QuantumSafe readiness, and a proven path to compliance.

Together, they offer a defense in depth blueprint that addresses customer pain points comprehensively: better detection, simpler integration, fewer false positives, and smoother certification. If your roadmap includes secure SoCs for AI, automotive, industrial, or payments, pairing  Agile Analog’s agileSecure with Rambus CryptoManager is a pragmatic way to raise the bar.