Cortus and SST show off low power SOC with NFC secure element uses

Cortus and SST show off low power SOC with NFC secure element uses

Cortus and SST are showing off a new low power system on chip (SOC) at Embedded World 2012 that could change the industrial design of NFC in smartphones. We don’t need to tell you that everyone wants smaller smartphones with less power consumption. In an era of convergent capabilities and a focus on keeping everything small, competitive OEMs are forced to constantly improve the power consumption and the size solutions take up on a board.

With NFC being added to smartphones this year, an obvious concern is how power consumption will be effected. NFC in and of itself takes very little power, but that doesn’t mean that savings in power consumption and sizing aren’t welcome. A basic rule of thumb suggests the smaller distances that electricity needs to travel within a circuit board, the less power that is required to operate a system. As it stands, NFC requires an NFC IC, a secure element and an antenna. Add to that the near universal addition of Bluetooth LE and you start to take up some heavy power usage and space within devices.

Cortus and SST dish up smaller system on chips that use less power for NFC and other applications

That’s where the new Cortus’ silicon efficient, ultra low power 32 bit microcontroller cores with SST’s low power, ultra high endurance embedded flash non-volatile memory (NVM) technology come into play. The new Cortus APS3 offers what the firm says is the smallest silicon footprint and power dissipation on the market for 32-bit processor cores. However, what is really of interest is that the new SOC contains SST SuperFlash technology provides a compact, low power embedded flash memory solution which is described to have ultra high endurance. Both firms see their new SOC being used in NFC SIM cards, NFC chipsets, Bluetooth LE, automotive sensors and smart meters.

NFC has been a new concept to OEMs for sometime, but now it appears it is being viewed as a standard that needs to be managed and the power consumption needs minimizing along with the size of system on chips. We think a goal of NFC in smartphones should be that an NFC portion of a smartphone could be powered off solar power alone so that a phone that has drained its power can within a few seconds build enough charge to be used for access control, to make an NFC payment or be used in a travel wallet.

“The ecosystem around the Cortus processors includes a full development environment (for C and C++), commonly used peripherals, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions such as cache and memory management units,” the firms said.

The Cortus and SST product brings this type of application a step closer and that can only be a good thing and everyone will want smaller, thinner NFC smartphones anyway.