02 / SILICON

Security you can fabricate.

Software trust has to start somewhere physical. QCore designs that starting point: the QC-SE100 secure element IC family, FPGA-proven roots of trust, licensable HSM IP, and key architectures where the secret is a property of the silicon itself.

  • [ FPGA-PROVEN ]
  • [ RISC-V RV32IMC ]
  • [ FIPS 140-3 L3 DESIGN TARGET ]
  • [ DESIGNED FOR INDIAN FABRICATION ]

QC-SE100 SECURE ELEMENT & HARDWARE TRUST ANCHOR IC FAMILY

An indigenous cryptographic secure element and hardware trust anchor IC family — designed in India, for Indian fabrication — anchoring trust in video surveillance, smart metering, and critical IoT infrastructure. The device your camera, meter, or gateway consults before it believes anything, including its own firmware.

QC-SE100 die block diagram: a secure CPU core, cryptographic engines, SP 800-90 TRNG, secure key storage, tamper sensors, and secure I/O inside a tamper-meshed die, connecting out to video surveillance, smart metering, and telematics applications A die outline drawn in amber contains six blocks: secure CPU core; crypto engines listing AES, SHA-2 and SHA-3, HMAC, RSA, ECC P-256 and P-384 with ECDSA and ECDH, and X25519; an SP 800-90 TRNG; secure key storage; tamper sensors with response logic; and secure I/O. A dashed inner boundary marks the tamper mesh. Lines from secure I/O connect to three application boxes on the right: video surveillance under MeitY Essential Requirements and STQC, smart metering under AMI security guidelines, and telematics under AIS-140. SECURE CPU CORE isolated execution; secure boot support CRYPTO ENGINES AES · SHA-2/SHA-3 · HMAC RSA · ECC P-256/384 ECDSA / ECDH · X25519 TRNG SP 800-90; health-tested SECURE KEY STORAGE keys never leave the die TAMPER SENSORS environmental + mesh monitoring; tamper response & key destruction SECURE I/O host interfaces VIDEO SURVEILLANCE MeitY Essential Requirements · STQC SMART METERING AMI security guidelines TELEMATICS & CRITICAL IOT AIS-140 DESIGNED IN INDIA · FOR INDIAN FABRICATION
One die, three regulated markets: the trust anchor is the same; the compliance mapping ships with it.
CRYPTOGRAPHY

Full engine set

  • AES, SHA-2 / SHA-3, HMAC
  • RSA and ECC P-256 / P-384 — ECDSA and ECDH
  • X25519 key agreement
  • SP 800-90 TRNG, health-tested
PROTECTION

Trust anchor duties

  • Secure key storage on-die
  • Secure boot support for the host system
  • Tamper detection with active response
COMPLIANCE BY DESIGN

Built against Indian requirements

  • MeitY Essential Requirements for CCTV security
  • STQC certification regime
  • Smart-metering / AMI security guidelines
  • AIS-140 telematics

How the silicon portfolio fits together

QC-SE100
The productised IC family — a secure element you design onto a board, built for Indian fabrication and Indian regulatory regimes.
CoreAnchor™ HRoT
The FPGA-proven root of trust — running today on physical development silicon, gating live workloads by attestation verdict.
Q-HSM
The licensable IP core — a complete hardware security module you integrate into your own ASIC or FPGA design.

Q-HSM RISC-V HARDWARE SECURITY MODULE IP CORE

A hardware security module as an IP core: a secure RISC-V (RV32IMC) controller running machine-mode only, commanding dedicated cryptographic hardware engines. The host CPU asks for operations. It never, under any code path, touches a key.

CRYPTO ENGINES

AES · SHA · ECC

  • AES-256 in GCM, XTS, and KW modes
  • SHA-2, SHA-3, and SHAKE
  • ECC over P-256, P-384, P-521 — ECDSA and ECDH
ENTROPY & KEYS

TRNG · key operations

  • SP 800-90 true random number generator, health-tested
  • Hardware key generation, wrap, and destruction
  • Constant-time implementations throughout
ARCHITECTURE

Zero-trust key handling

  • Keys never cross to the host CPU
  • Capability-based access control
  • Anti-tamper sensors with automatic zeroization
  • FIPS 140-3 Level 3 design target for ASIC

CoreAnchor™ HRoT HARDWARE ROOT OF TRUST · FPGA-PROVEN

Every trusted system has a first instruction. CoreAnchor HRoT makes that instruction unforgeable: an immutable boot ROM measures each firmware stage, verifies its digital signature in hardware, and only then releases the CPU. It is proven on real silicon — Zynq UltraScale+ class and Artix-7 class devices — and its attestation verdicts can gate live workloads, starting and killing containers in real time.

CoreAnchor HRoT boot chain: immutable boot ROM measures firmware into PCRs, verifies each stage's digital signature against eFUSE-anchored keys, and only then releases the CPU; attestation reports flow out to gate workloads A left-to-right boot chain diagram. An immutable boot ROM leads to a measurement stage that extends TPM-like PCRs, then to a hardware signature-verification stage fed by eFUSE key storage and a device-unique identity, then to CPU release. A remote attestation output gates container workloads. IMMUTABLE BOOT ROM first instruction, fixed in silicon MEASURE hash each stage into TPM-like PCRs VERIFY SIGNATURE verified in hardware, against eFUSE-anchored keys PASS RELEASE CPU application cores start from a verified state only EFUSE KEYS device-unique identity, public-key anchors ATTEST remote reports; gate workloads verdict: start / kill containers, live FAIL → HALT & ZEROIZE FOOTPRINT: ~18K LUTS · UNDER 7% OF A ZU9EG · PROVEN ON ZYNQ ULTRASCALE+ AND ARTIX-7 CLASS DEVICES
The CPU does not run until the silicon has proof. Attestation verdicts can start — or kill — real workloads.
BOOT

Measured, verified boot

Immutable ROM, hardware-verified secure boot and firmware verification, and measured boot with TPM-like PCRs — every stage proves itself before it runs.

IDENTITY

Device-unique trust

eFUSE key storage and a device-unique identity make every unit individually attestable. Remote attestation reports what booted, on which device, with cryptographic proof.

QCore Trust Suite EIGHT PRODUCTS · ALL DEMONSTRATED LIVE ON SILICON

A productised family built on one idea: the most secure key is one that never exists as stored data. PUF — a physically unclonable function, a fingerprint burned into silicon by physics itself — lets these products derive secrets on demand instead of keeping them.

TRUST ENGINE

CoreRoot™

A silicon-intrinsic trust engine — not a peripheral bolted on, but a capability the chip is born with.

KEY SEALING

CoreVault™

Keys sealed in silicon via a PUF-derived KDF. Never stored, never exported — regenerated from physics each time they are needed.

SIGNING

CoreSign™

Signing bound to attested hardware, including threshold distributed signing — no single device can sign alone.

ATTESTATION

CoreProof™

Attestation bound to the physical device, so "this firmware, on this exact unit" becomes a verifiable statement.

ROOT SECRETS

CoreZero™

A PUF-seeded, constant-time fuzzy extractor feeding on-die key generation. There is no stored root secret to steal.

KEY LIFECYCLE

CoreFabric™ AG

Full offline symmetric key lifecycle — generate, wrap, transport, unwrap, destroy — for estates where the network is never an option.

MONITORING

CoreAttest™

Continuous verification of device, firmware, and boot state across a fleet — trust as a live signal, not a deployment-day assumption.

ACCELERATION

CoreCrypt™

Cryptographic accelerator cores for designs that need protected crypto throughput at line rate.

Hardware security engineering

The same team that designs our silicon evaluates yours. We work at the level where attacks actually happen: power rails, debug ports, bitstreams, and firmware binaries.

Side-channel
Side-channel attack protection and evaluation — power and electromagnetic analysis resistance, designed in and then measured.
Hardware trojans
Hardware trojan detection across third-party IP and supply-chain-exposed designs.
Boot & entropy
Secure boot implementation, TRNG design and validation, and PUF integration.
Debug & tamper
JTAG and debug-port lockdown, anti-tamper architecture, and FPGA bitstream security.
Firmware analysis
Embedded firmware security analysis, static and dynamic: leaked secrets, entropy anomalies, risky imports, FSM encoding issues, and protocol fuzzing.

Questions we actually get asked

What exactly is a PUF, and why should I trust one?

A physically unclonable function is a fingerprint burned into silicon by physics itself — microscopic manufacturing variation that no two dies share and no fab can reproduce on demand. Our CoreZero™ reads that fingerprint through a constant-time fuzzy extractor and derives keys from it. The key exists only while it is being used; power off, and there is nothing to extract.

"FPGA-proven" — what does that actually mean?

It means the design runs, today, on physical development hardware — Zynq UltraScale+ class and Artix-7 class devices — executing real boot flows and real attestation, not simulation waveforms. The flagship root-of-trust build occupies roughly 18k LUTs, under 7% of a ZU9EG. We demonstrate on live silicon during evaluation.

Is Q-HSM FIPS 140-3 certified?

No, and we will not claim otherwise. Q-HSM is designed to FIPS 140-3 Level 3 as an ASIC target — the anti-tamper, zeroization, and key-isolation architecture is built for that bar. Certification is a formal process with a lab and a certificate number; when we have one, this page will say so.

Why machine-mode only on the RISC-V controller?

Fewer privilege levels, fewer transitions, fewer bugs. The Q-HSM controller runs a single, auditable machine-mode firmware with no user-mode surface to escape from. Combined with capability-based access control, the host gets exactly the operations it was granted — and nothing else.

Can attestation actually control workloads, or is it just a report?

It controls them. In our live demonstrations, CoreAnchor HRoT attestation verdicts gate container execution: a device that measures clean gets its workload started; a device that fails verification has it killed. Trust becomes an enforcement point, not a dashboard colour.

NEXT STEP

Watch it boot. Watch it refuse to.

Our silicon demonstrations run on real FPGA hardware: signed firmware boots, tampered firmware halts, and attestation gates a live workload in front of you.