“As a leader in security, we strive to ensure our products are immune to both existing and potential new threats or vulnerabilities,” says Microsemi CTO Jim Aralis, “as soon as news broke about Meltdown and Spectre, Microsemi immediately assessed its existing products with thorough analysis of the architecture and intellectual property (IP) blocks with its internal security experts. The assessment clearly concluded that none of the processor cores embedded with the associated use models in Microsemi products are impacted by these weaknesses.”

Microsemi’s FPGAs are not affected by Spectre or Meltdown, and the company’s devices also offer multiple security layers for maximum protection.

In addition to its SmartFusion and SmartFusion2 FPGAs, and communications and storage products—which do not have either security flaw—the company’s soft RISC-V core and its RISC-V IP provider are also unaffected by the security issues.

Both Spectre and Meltdown affect speculative execution in modern computer chips, but they can be abused via various methods.

Microsemi says it offers a heightened level of securityvwith these vulnerabilities, as its hard and soft CPUs are not affected by this issue, and in fact enhance security protecting against various side channel attacks.