Breakfast Bytes Blogs

I was in San Francisco for the RSA security conference. On Monday, it has tutorials and the conference has its opening keynote at 3 pm. So I had lunch with Andreas Kuehlmann. At the time of our lunch, he was CEO of Tortuga Logic, but the company has rebranded under the name Cycuity. The company has been a long-time partner with Cadence in the security area. For example, they appear in the image with all the partners in my post Secure Before You Fabricate.

When I first met Andreas, we both worked for Cadence. He ran Cadence Berkeley Labs, which did research and, you won't be surprised to discover, was based in Berkeley. About ten years later, he was SVP of R&D at Coverity, and I interviewed him for SemiWiki. I lived on the corner of 3rd and King in San Francisco, which backed onto Berry Street, and Coverity's offices were on the other side of Berry Street. So it was a two-minute walk to get to his office, although I think we then went for lunch somewhere nearby. Of course, Coverity was acquired by Synopsys, and Andreas went on to run the whole security segment, building it up to about $350M through a mixture of growth and acquisitions.

He then retired and didn't plan on doing another company, but he let himself be persuaded to join the board of Tortuga Logic. A few weeks later, they asked him to take over as CEO and run the company, which was about 18 months ago.

A bit of history. Tortuga Logic was founded in 2014 with a focus on government. They had funding from DARPA and SBIR. When Spectre and Meltdown hit a few years ago, security became a lot more serious, and the type of technology that Tortuga Logic provided increased in importance. These vulnerabilities (and some more found soon after) were a big surprise. Not only did they affect all processors that were advanced enough to do speculative execution, but they had also been hiding in plain sight for at least a decade.

For some background on Spectre and Meltdown, start with my posts:

• Spectre/Meltdown & What It Means for Future Design 1
• Spectre/Meltdown & What It Means for Future Design 2
• Spectre/Meltdown & What It Means for Future Design 3

As a result of Spectre and Meltdown, there is greater awareness around hardware security and Cycuity has expanded its focus on the commercial sector. Andreas told me that this year they are growing nicely. The Mil-Aero business continues, and automotive is red-hot, driven by cybersecurity concerns, including a new ISO automotive security standard 21434 (see my post Have You Heard of ISO 21434? You Will). What Cycuity’s information flow technology does to prevent hardware security vulnerabilities is that it tracks and traces all security assets independently of their values, as they flow across the chip and through logical and sequential transformations, offering unique insights into the design’s security behavior.

As we say in one of our flyers:

Unique information flow technology from Tortuga Logic, paired with high-performance simulation, emulation, and metrics analysis environments from Cadence, provides a unique approach for concisely specifying, verifying, and automating the coverage of Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs) to enable quantifiable assurance.

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