Simplified development of smart, connected and secure solutions

Microchip has announced the CEC1702 hardware cryptography-enabled microcontroller which addresses the increasing need for security measures, such as secure boot, driven by the continual growth of IoT applications. The device is a full-featured ARM Cortex-M4-based microcontroller with a complete hardware cryptography-enabled solution 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 also provides significant performance improvements when compared to firmware-based solutions. The device’s hardware cryptographic cipher suite reduces compute time by orders of magnitude over software solutions by providing, for example, a 20-50x 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.