April 28, 2026. With Masur25, the Barkhausen Institute has developed a digital research chip on which scientists can test new technologies for secure and trustworthy digital systems in practice.
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Microelectronics
Barkhausen Institute: New research chip from Dresden for secure digital systems
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Housing of the Masur25 (left) and the Masur25 chip (right), an evaluation board in the background. Photo:Rafael Vinz / Barkhausen Institute
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Silicon Saxony
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Whoever wants to develop new digital microchips sometimes faces major hurdles. This is because manufacturing their own chips is complex, expensive and therefore hardly possible for many research institutions. A new research chip from Dresden aims to help overcome these hurdles.
“If we want to design digital systems independently and securely, we must also be able to develop the underlying chips ourselves,” says Prof. Dr. Gerhard Fettweis, founding director and scientific director of the Barkhausen Institute. “Our research result, the Masur25 chip, allows external partner institutions to integrate and test their own modules without having to design and manufacture a complete chip themselves. We shorten development times and thus reduce costs considerably. This significantly lowers the entry barriers for our partners when it comes to chip design.”
The chip was developed entirely at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden – from the draft to the physical design to the tests in our own laboratory. The Barkhausen Institute team is already working on the next stage of development. The successor Masur26 is currently in the so-called tape-out stage. This is the step in which the final design data is handed over to the chip factory for production. As with Masur25, the team has very successfully used the cloud-based makeChip development environment of the Dresden-based company Racyics GmbH for this.
Dresden has been one of the most important locations for European microelectronics for many years. Research institutions and companies are working on new semiconductor technologies in the Silicon Saxony network. With its research chips, the Barkhausen Institute creates a unique bridge between university research and the practical development of modern chip architectures.
About the Barkhausen Institute
The Barkhausen Institute (BI) is an internationally recognized research institute that conducts cutting-edge research into the trustworthiness of networked electronic systems. In an interdisciplinary, international team, it pursues the goal of creating a reliable basis for the Internet of the future and enabling trust in digital technologies, in particular through the development of trustworthy platform chips.
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Photo:Rafael Vinz / Barkhausen Institute
