Renesas to Release MCU for Smart Cards with On-Chip USB Controller
March 10, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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Renesas Technology Corp. announced the AE56U, a 32 b microcontroller (MCU) for smart cards with an on-chip universal serial bus (USB) controller. Sample shipments will begin in June 2008 in Japan.
The device can be used for USB token applications implementing highly secure digital signature functionality for fields such as online banking.
These include security verification terminals such as electronic point Of sale (e-POS) reader/writers and PCs and embedded devices with processing linked to image processing modules requiring a USB interface for communication.
The AE56U is built around the AE-5 32 b central processing unit (CPU) core, incorporates on-chip electrically erasable and programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) and offers the following:
- General-purpose input/output (I/O) ports for expandability of peripheral functionality. When a USB token incorporating the AE56U is connected to a PC or similar terminal, connections can be made with peripheral devices within the terminal, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD) controller for display data or flash memory.
- 12 Mbps of data transfer rate possible by supporting USB 2.0.
- Conformance to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Technical Specification (TS) 102 600 V7.0.0. This standard defines the USB interface between a terminal and an integrated circuit card (ICC) that may be supported by the universal integrated circuit card (UICC) and terminal in addition to the interface specified in TS 102 221.
This device also supports classes A (5 volt (V)) and class B (3 V) in International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 7816 by incorporating a regulator.
Renesas said the AE56U uses its proprietary metal oxide nitride oxide silicon (MONOS) EEPROM to ensure a high degree of reliability, and the circuit design has been tweaked to reduce the size of the memory cells and achieve an excellent cost-performance ratio.
The memory capacity of 72 KB can store multiple applications or large data sets. In addition, the AE56U has 224 KB of on-chip mask read-only memory (ROM) that can be used to store a general operating system (OS) that performs multiple types of processing.
The large capacity can accommodate future OS upgrades even if their size is larger, and the mask ROM can also be used to store application programs or data that do not need to be overwritten, Renesas said.
Source: Renesas Technology Corp.