Microchip Technology SAM L10 and SAM L11 MCU families

With the growth of IoT nodes, security has become an afterthought for many designers, increasing the risk of exposing intellectual property (IP) and sensitive information. Fortunately, the SAM L10 and SAM L11 MCU families from Microchip can help designers plan for security at an early stage with Arm TrustZone for Armv8-M, a programmable environment that provides hardware isolation between certified libraries, IP and application code.

The MCUs, based on the Arm Cortex-M23 core, feature chip-level tamper resistance, secure boot and secure key storage that, when combined with TrustZone technology, protect customer applications from both remote and physical attacks. The SAM L11 family also includes an onboard cryptographic module supporting Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), as well as a secure bootloader for secure firmware upgrades.

Both MCU families offer Microchip’s latest generation Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC) for capacitive touch capability with good water tolerance and noise immunity, making the devices suitable for automotive, appliance, medical and consumer human machine interface (HMI) applications.

In addition, they provide good power consumption in active and all sleep modes with the company’s picoPower technology. The SAM L10 received a ULPMark score of 405, which is said to be over 200% better performance than the nearest competitor certified by EEMBC. A power debugger and data analyser tool is available to monitor and analyse power consumption in real time and fine-tune the consumption numbers on the fly to meet application needs.