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Member Profile: Atmel
Smart Card Talk spoke with Alex Giakoumis, Director, Corporate Business Development, Smart Card & Secure ICs for Atmel Corporation and Smart Card Alliance Board Member.
1. What are Atmel's main business profile and offerings?
Atmel is a US semiconductor company and a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of secure microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions. Focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets, Atmel ICs can be found Everywhere You AreSM.
 2. What role does smart card technology play in supporting Atmel's business?
Smart card technology plays a significant role in Atmel's business. It is very complementary to our core businesses which are embedded technology, nonvolatile memories, ASICs and RF technologies.
The embedded microcontroller IC is the most important element of the smart card. It represents the data and the security, as well as the logic and the intelligence, of the card for its functions and communication to and from the external world. Providing the secure smart card IC technology that essentially makes smart cards smarter, Atmel is in a unique position to contribute to the needs of the rapidly growing smart card market. Our leadership in EEPROM technology, our experience in designing highly complex IC functions, and our 20+ years of experience (more than 2000 years of engineering experience) in security have put Atmel in a unique position to provide our customers with a wide range of cost-effective smart card products. The graph indicates the role smart card technology has played in our business growth during the last four years.
3. What trends do you see developing in the market that Atmel hopes to capitalize on?
The trends we see are:
- Bigger and bigger EEPROM, particularly in the telecommunications and ID sectors. With the telecommunications sector moving to 2.5G and introducing 3G services and with the ID sector storing biometric data on smart cards, EEPROM capacity has increased from 32K to more than 256Kbytes in size.
- Strong demand for secure flash memory products.
- Greater interest in the United States for smart cards.
- The fast pace of development in both the e-passport and ID markets.
4. What obstacles to growth do you see that must be overcome to capitalize on these opportunities?
The e-passport initiative is probably the biggest open platform we have come across. Such an initiative requires well-defined standards that will assure 100% interoperability -- not only for a national implementation, but also among all of the countries that will be involved. "Interoperability across the board" is probably one of the biggest barriers before full implementation. Another obstacle we see is the maturity of contactless technology implementations for highly secure open platform programs. In the past, contactless technology has been used mostly with memory chips in closed systems, where the processing power and security are limited to a certain level. With microcontroller smart cards or e-passports where processing power and the use of public key cryptography algorithms are needed, contactless deployment is at a very early stage.
5. What do you see are the key factors driving smart card technology in the market?
- Security
- Convenience
- Flexibility and wide range of services
6. How do you see your involvement in the Alliance helping Atmel become successful?
The Smart Card Alliance as a non-profit industry association has been doing an awesome job -- through its conferences, workshops and particularly the white papers -- educating the whole world about the great features and benefits of smart card technology. In North America, the Alliance has become the center of smart card technology information exchange, business developments and lobbying. Our involvement with the Alliance helps Atmel get the recognition we deserve for the secure technology we have put in place and for the leadership position in security we have accomplished.
 7. What is Atmel's commitment to the security marketplace?
We have the industry's largest portfolio of secure semiconductor solutions. With our state-of-the-art EEPROM, flash and ROM technologies and with the availability of three different CPUs, Atmel today has a wide range of secure Common Criteria and FIPS-certified products that address all smart card applications -- including PC security, set top boxes, Pay TV, banking, telecommunications and ID-related applications. In 2003, Atmel delivered just over 130 million units of secure microcontrollers and is expected to deliver close to 200 million units this year. Atmel is the number one market leader in EEPROM products and secure flash microcontrollers and we want to maintain our leadership by continuing to offer cost-effective smart card products.
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