NuMicro® M2354 Series – IoT Security MCU with Chip-Level Physical Security, Ultra-low Power Performance, and Complies with International Mainstream IoT Security Standards

In recent years, the rise of the Internet of Things era has increased people’s awareness of the integration of the real world and digital systems. Digitization has improved life efficiency and economic benefits, and the COVID-19 epidemic has also brought people new working and life patterns which have further accelerated the deployment of IoT application services.However, the security issues of every network-connected device also pose new challenges for system developers. More and more national or regional network security supervision departments have proposed corresponding security standards and regulations. Nuvoton Technology debuts brand new NuMicro® M2354 IoT Security microcontroller series. In addition to inherit the security features of NuMicro® M2351 Series that have been Arm® PSA Certified™ Level 1, Level 2 and PSA Functional API Certified, M2354 Series endows the microcontrollers used by network-connected devices with the physical level (chip-level) security protection function. It ensures the software and hardware integration system products developed can meet the requirement of information and communication security for the international mainstream standards, and it can also simplify the  implementation of regulations compliant products that require the security certification. At the same time, it satisfies the development and design requirements of the device itself that requires low-power operation. 

NuMicro® M2354 series microcontrollers are based on Arm® Cortex®-M23. In addition to the built-in TrustZone® technology of the Armv8-M architecture, it also adds protection functions against side-channel attacks to cryptographic hardware accelerators as well as fault injection attacks of voltage and clock pin surges. Furthermore, M2354 Series has implemented the microcontroller platform security hardware features, including debug port management (Debug Port Management), product life cycle management (Product Lifecycle Management), Firmware Version Counter and a Secure Key storage area with chip physical level security, allowing the microcontroller application system to easily realize data storage security, software execution security and message communication security.

M2354 Series Supports IoT Security Goals

The M2354 series of microcontrollers can run at a frequency of up to 96 MHz, built-in 1MBytes dual-bank architecture Flash memory, can support real-time memory re-map to execute the updated firmware version after a successful firmware over-the-air update (Secure FOTA Update).

M2354 Series System Block Diagram

NuMicro® M235x Series – Comprehensive Security Features of Secure IoT Microcontrollers

In addition to the TrustZone® technology, the NuMicro® M23 all secure IoT microcontroller series also has built-in security technologies that can improve system security. Among them, the Secure Bootloader loading program can support the Trusted Boot function; the hardware encryption accelerator including AES, RSA, ECC algorithms can reduce the load of the main processor in the encryption and decryption operations; XOM (Execute-Only Memory) can define Execute -Only memory area to protect key code; Flash lock bits are designed to prevent the debugging interface of Flash memory from being accessed or written by the outside; Tamper detection pins can be used to detect the state change on the pins linking to system boards for intrusion detection.

NuMicro^®  M235x IoT Security Microcontrollers

Outstanding Power Management Technology for IoT Innovation

With the wide options of power management modes, M2354 Series has excellent power consumption numbers with full flexibility. In Normal Run mode, it consumes 89.3 μA/ MHz with LDO power supply and 39.6 μA/ MHz with DC-DC power supply. The Standby Power-Down mode consumes less than 2 μA. In Deep Power-Down mode with V_BAT power supply, it consumes 0.5 μA for 80-bytes content retention of RTC registers. It can further down to 0.1 μA if there is no need to keep the 80-bytes content of RTC registers.

M2354 Series Power Consumption Performance

 Nuvoton Secure Microcontroller Platform (NuSMP 2.0)

The Platform Security Architecture (PSA) launched by Arm® is an IoT ecosystem security solution. This solution includes threat model analysis, security analysis, to hardware and firmware architecture specifications, and open source The firmware reference design; this solution also provides basic design principles, allowing developers to build more secure IoT devices in a more efficient way. PSA has now developed to three certification levels, namely PSA Certified^TM Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3.In order to allow developers to more conveniently implement IoT security technology in innovative development, Nuvoton Technology has developed the "Nuvoton Secure Microcontroller Platform (Nuvoton Secure Microcontroller Platform, NuSMP)" that supports Arm® PSA. NuSMP is a security technology that mixes hardware and software to meet the security requirements of general-purpose and IoT security microcontroller series. Developers can easily implement secure designs on NuMicro® M23 Line microcontrollers through NuSMP technology, including Trusted Boot (Root of Trust), secure Over-The-Air (OTA) firmware updates, software downloads, non-secure zone Power Management, and encryption and decryption software tools on the PC side. NuSMP 1.0 can comply with PSA Level 1 and Level 2 security certification, while NuSMP 2.0 imported by M2354 can also comply with PSA Level 3 or other IoT device security certification levels of the same security level.

NuSMP Functional Block Diagram

The entire offering suite is constructed in compliance of Chain of Trust (CoT) with several secure booting layers named NuMicro^® Boot Loader 1 (NuBL1, hardware level), Boot Loader 2 (NuBL2 first software level including trusted boot code and memory partition manager with OTA update feature), Boot Loader 32 (NuBL32, for Secure World), Boot Loader 33 (NuBL33, for Non-Secure World). With the CoT guarantee, all services and software tool can support most security requirements for MCU applications.

Easy to Implement、Easy to Develop

Being committed to providing an easy development experience, Nuvoton offers a wealth of resources to work with the NuMicro M2354 series. For compiler selection, M2354 Series supports the development on Arm® Keil MDK, IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm® and GCC. Furthermore, the Keil MDK Nuvoton Edition for M2354 series is free to use. For supporting tools, M2354 Series offers helpful tools to aid the project progress. For example, the TrustZone Template Generator could assist the security state planning and the secure firmware building; the CryptoTool could support the cryptographic requirements of M2354 series, including key generation, key exchange, signature, encryption and decryption. For security project developing, Nuvoton offers NuSMP (Nuvoton Secure Microcontroller Platform) of integrated security technologies. The application note, sample code and training videos for each technology would be available for developers to access and reference. Lastly, the Multi-RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) for IoT solutions and the Segger emWin for interactive interfaces are both supported in M2354 Series.

Multiple Supported Resources of the M2354 Series