EnSilica plc announced the release of a range of Post-Quantum Cryptography ("PQC") accelerators, with the first of these intellectual property ("IP") licenses granted to a major semiconductor supplier. EnSilica is one of the few companies to offer advanced cryptographic accelerators1 to the market as licensable IP cores, expanding EnSilica's comprehensive range of non-quantum resistant cryptography accelerators for use in its ASICs and other semiconductors. PQC refers to cryptographic algorithms that can withstand cyber-attacks from quantum computers.

As quantum computing advances and noting that artificial intelligence ("AI") based systems are often backed by large datasets that need to be kept secured, there is a real threat that cyber-attacks will break the current public key-based cryptography used in today's secure communications and financial transactions. The draft standard for the first of these cryptographic algorithms was published by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST") last year. The widespread adoption of PQC is fuelled by the fear that sensitive encrypted data harvested, might one day be compromised once powerful quantum computers emerge.

This is a critical concern for governments safeguarding secrets and businesses handling sensitive and confidential information. As well as PQC, the cybersecurity landscape is evolving, necessitating the redesign of many ASICs. This is due to the European Union's recently enacted Network and Information Security ("NIS2") directive.

The NIS2 directive, now encompassing a wider remit than the original Network and Information Security directive released in 2016, now includes the manufacturing sectors for critical products such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and chemicals, as well as other critical services such as energy and waste management, public electronic communication networks as well as space and aerospace.