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Designers cannot assume the equipment they are using is trustworthy and must look to new technology to secure systems, warned Microchip Technology. It has released the configurable microcontroller-based CEC1736 Trust Shield family goes beyond NIST 800-193 Platform Firmware Resiliency guidelines, with runtime firmware protection that anchors the secure boot process while establishing an entire chain of trust for the system platform.

The CEC1736 configurable real-time platform root of trust enables runtime firmware protection in the SPI flash and I2C/SMBus filtering against run time attacks. 

The attestation feature provides trustworthy evidence to ensure that critical devices in the platform are authentic. Lifecycle management and ownership transfer features protect secrets throughout the end product lifecycle and during the transfer of product ownership, allowing different operators to use the system platform securely without compromising information.

“The presumption of equipment trustworthiness is no longer acceptable, and it is imperative to both expect and guard against unauthorised firmware components while also distrusting peripheral components until proven trustworthy,” said Ian Harris, vice president of Microchip’s Computing Product business unit. “Our CEC1736 Trust Shield family . . . . provides a complete solution to these challenges that simplifies development and provisioning of keys and other secrets while speeding time to market and providing the flexibility to stay ahead of threats,” he added. 

The CEC1736 Trust Shield family’s hardware crypto cipher suite is equipped with AES-256, SHA-512, RSA-4096, ECC with key size up to 571 bits and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with a 384-bit key length. 

The 384-bit hardware physically unclonable function (PUF) enables a unique root key and symmetric secret and private key generation and protection. The root of trust and security meets the NIST 800-193 and OCP (Open Compute Project) security guidelines to allow for a quick adoption of the latest security advances and standards, Microchip added. 

Microchip’s CEC1736 Trust Shield family consists of silicon, software, tools, a development board and provisioning capabilities for firmware protection. 

Microchip’s development tools for the CEC1736 Trust Shield family are the Trust Platform Design Suite (TPDS) and a graphical user interface (GUI) configurator for exploring capabilities, defining the security configuration and provisioning secrets for prototyping and production. Microchip’s MPLAB Harmony is an integrated embedded software development framework, designed to simplify device set up, library selection and application development. There is also the CEC1736 development board and Microchip’s Soteria-G3 firmware.

http://www.microchip.com

The latest member of the Kria portfolio of adaptive system on modules (SoMs) is the KR260 robotics starter kit. AMD said it delivers a productivity gain nearly five times that of competing Nvidia-based GPU-based systems, together with an eight times performance/W ratio and 3.5 times lower latency.

The Kria KR260 offers a seamless path to production deployment with the existing Kria K26 adaptive SOMs. It has native support for ROS 2, the standard framework for robotics application development, and pre-built interfaces for robotics and industrial solutions. It is designed for the rapid development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision and industrial communication and control. 

In addition to improvements compared with competing systems, the Kria KR260 accelerates the design cycle compared to chip-down design, the Kria SoM portfolio typically offers up to a nine month saving in time to deployment, with no FPGA expertise required.

According to Chetan Khona, senior director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets at AMD, the kit allows robotic developers to “work in their standard development environment on a platform that has all the interfaces and capabilities needed to be up and running in less than an hour. . . to accelerate robotics innovation and easily take ideas to production at scale”. 

Industry analyst Omdia forecasted the robotics components market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4 per cent between 2019 and 2025, with the overall world markets revenue to increase to approximately $126 billion by 

The KR260 hardware platform provides pre-built interfaces for robotics and industrial designs which can be combined with accelerated applications delivered via the AMD-Xilinx App Store. 

The central Kria Robotics Stack is an integrated set of robot libraries and utilities that use hardware to accelerate the development, maintenance and commercialisation of industrial-grade robotic designs targeting Kria SoMs. The low-latency, adaptive computing architecture of Kria SoMs implemented with KRS and ROS 2 can improve performance/watt and latency compared to competitive GPU-based solutions, confirmed AMD.  

The KR260 also includes support for the Ubuntu embedded operating system, providing compatibility with Ubuntu Linux Desktop (22.04) from Canonical and ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill.

AMD is collaborating with Open Robotics, the creators of ROS 2 and other open software and hardware platforms for robotics, to validate and ensure compliance of our ROS 2 implementation for the robotics community.

The Kria KR260 robotics starter kit is immediately available from AMD and its network of worldwide distributors. The KR260 starter kit joins the Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, providing an easy-to-use development platform for designing vision applications. 

http://www.amd.com

Short range connectivity software specialist, Clarinox Technologies has added ClariFi Insight, a non-intrusive trace and debugger which enables customers to debug their systems that include ClarinoxWiFi or ClarinoxBlue. 

ClariFi Insight traces the behaviour of a system, enabling developers to identify and correct errant application behaviour by capturing high-speed events. This has been successfully tested at speeds of 100mbit per second UDP over Wi-Fi.

Clarinox said that unlike many debug tools, ClariFi Insight does not interfere with the normal behaviour and functionality of embedded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth applications. This is particularly beneficial in high speed applications where a typical trace debug process can create interruptions that interfere with system sequencing and performance. 

The small footprint of ClariFi Insight ensures that developers can trace and debug high-speed events without slowing the software application and impacting normal system behaviour, said the company. 

The trend towards cloud connectivity, remote management and increased system integration requires once disparate systems to work together. Firmware from multiple silicon vendors, real time operating systems (RTOS) / operating systems (OS), and TCP/IP stack combine with drivers (e.g. USB, UART, and SDIO) as well as the connectivity stacks all operating under the customer’s own embedded application layer. ClariFi Insight provides information about how the various parts function and perform as they communicate and pass data to the ClarinoxWiFi and ClarinoxBlue components.

By providing providing clarity into the behaviour of even high speed Wi-Fi, develops can debug emerging applications such as video streaming from a camera over Wi-Fi at 10s of Mbits speed, commented Gokhan Tanyeri, CTO, Clarinox Technologies.

“ClariFi Insight is designed for debugging performance issues, but it can also be helpful for projects without a spare port for debugging or where the communications port, such as UART, is too slow to capture the high-speed events. It can also be used for Bluetooth applications such as A2DP music streaming,” he added.

It uses a small memory buffer at a set memory location to trace functionality. A buffer which can be as small as a few kbytes, is sufficient to enable a developer to debug a system crash or capture what is taking place on the target. When coupled with the option of defining custom events with short or long packets of data, these insights give engineers the visibility needed to trace whether one part of the system is attempting to communicate and/or pass data incorrectly or at the wrong time.

Once ClariFi Insight records the pre-defined events, the data can be read into ClariFi, where the full set of tools, including the Lua scripting capability, can search and analyse the information. The data can then be used with or without these other ClariFi debug, protocol analysis, and automated testing features. 

ClariFi Insight performance measurements could, for example, be taken during an automated testing session driven by ClariFi scripting engine. Various data formats are supported for reading the data by ClariFi. Today raw binary, Intel hex format or Motorola S format is supported.

Being non-intrusive, ClariFi Insight can be embedded in the release code. Trish Messiter, Clarinox Technologies, CEO explained: “When added to the release code, ClariFi Insight can be used to collect data on customer-reported issues from the field, if needed. Developers—and their customers—can rest assured that any bugs that happen not only during development, but also afterwards, can be traced and fixed.”   

https://www.clarinox.com