The CEC1702 hardware cryptography-enabled microcontroller from Microchip Technology Inc. addresses the increasing need for security measures, such as secure boot, driven by the continual growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The full-featured ARM® Cortex®-M4-based microcontroller provides a complete hardware cryptography-enabled solution in a single package.

The 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 minimize customer risk. The CEC1702 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, and, as an example, provides 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.

Whether it’s being used as a security coprocessor or as a standalone microcontroller, the CEC1702 delivers a multi-dimensional defense against attacks, including:

Pre-boot authentication of system firmware : Providing an immutable identity and a root of trust to ensure that the firmware is untouched and hasn’t been corrupted.

: Providing an immutable identity and a root of trust to ensure that the firmware is untouched and hasn’t been corrupted. Firmware update authentication : Verifying that the firmware update has not been corrupted and is from a trusted source.

: Verifying that the firmware update has not been corrupted and is from a trusted source. Authentication of system critical commands : Attesting that any system-critical command is from a known source with authorization to make the given change, preventing potentially devastating actions.

: Attesting that any system-critical command is from a known source with authorization to make the given change, preventing potentially devastating actions. Protection of secrets with encryption: Safeguarding code and data to prevent theft or malicious activities.



Microchip simplifies adding authentication and encryption to connected designs by offering a full development suite, including hardware and software tools as well as peripheral libraries and crypto Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to speed up design cycles.



The CEC1702Q-B1-SX is available in production volume for $2.60 per device in 10k unit quantities.