The epiphany that emerged from UF engineering professors Swarup Bhunia and Sandip Ray was such a game-changing proposal that IEEE Spectrum, the flagship news magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, insisted that they coauthor an October 2017 feature article to unveil the concept to their two million print and online subscribers.
With the rapid proliferation of all things ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) — the realm of smart or automated objects and devices that are interconnected or exchange data via the Internet — a necessary, cost-effective microchip security solution has followed. The answer posed by Dr. Bhunia, Ph.D., director of Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World and Semmoto Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Dr. Ray, Ph.D., Endowed IoT Term Professor in ECE, seemed an impossibility, or at least a misnomer: ‘patchable hardware.’ But the breakthrough may actually be what the industry was waiting for.