Microchip CEC1702 hardware cryptography-enabled microcontroller

The Microchip CEC1702 hardware cryptography-enabled microcontroller addresses the increasing need for security measures, such as secure boot, driven by the continual growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The product is a full-featured ARM Cortex-M4-based microcontroller with a complete hardware cryptography-enabled system in a single package. This low-power, but powerful, programmable 32-bit microcontroller offers easy-to-use encryption, authentication, private and public key capabilities and allows customer programming flexibility to minimise customer risk.

The device’s hardware cryptographic cipher suite reduces compute time by orders of magnitude over software solutions and provides 20x-50x performance improvement for PKE acceleration as well as 100x improvement for encryption/decryption. This robust hardware-based feature set results in applications that can run security measures quickly, effectively and with significantly lower cost and power consumption.

The product delivers a multidimensional defence against attacks, including pre-boot authentication of system firmware; firmware update authentication; authentication of system critical commands; and protection of secrets with encryption.