[Cryptech Tech] arm

[Hannes Tschofenig]

Hi Randy,

I work for ARM and could help you with your questions.

In our group we have been working on mbed (and the next generation of
mbed is currently work in progress), which we have announced at ARM
TechCon last October.

Mbed is designed to work with the Cortex M process family.
There are different types of processors available in that family, namely
M0, M0+, M3, M4, and now also M7. The M7 was announced around ARM
TechCon as well and aims to bridge the gap (in performance) between the
Cortex M family in the Cortex A family.

One important difference between Cortex M and Cortex A family is that
Cortex A has a memory management unit and Cortex M doesn't. Cortex M
processors have a memory protection unit. The consequence is that you
can run ordinary Linux on the A class but not on the M class. Needless
to say that there are many operating systems available for Cortex M
class CPUs and we developed one as well.

All the info about mbed and our plans can be found at http://mbed.org

To actually see the different features of a processor you have to look
at one of the vendors. Every vendor provides their own unique features.
I have used Cortex M class CPUs from Nordic Semiconductor (see
http://www.nordicsemi.com/), Texas Instruments (see http://www.ti.com/),
STMicroelectronics (see http://www.st.com/), NXP Semiconductors (see
http://www.nxp.com/), and Freescale Semiconductor (see
http://www.freescale.com/).

You will be astonished to see what features our silicon partners add to
the chips...

Ciao
Hannes

PS: Why you want to use an FPGA is still a mystery to me.


On 01/10/2015 09:14 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
> [ repost to tech ]
> 
> so we're starting to spec the next gen, an alpha, cryptech board.  a
> custom job with only what we need on it.  the first sketch is at
> 
>    https://wiki.cryptech.is/wiki/Hardware
> 
> which may move as i edit wiki today.
> 
> bunnie sez the board desiners in singapore and taiwan come in flavors
> based on the arm type.  so we kinda have to learn arm types to make a
> decision.
> 
> we think we want
>   o no or minimal magic blobs because it's inside the security boundary
>   o support for booting, flash file system, and usb
>   o some speed, but the crypto is done in the fpga
>   o rtos components without rms virus
> 
> internal gossip is that joachim is using, or has used, coretex + mbed.
> joachim, care to be specific and assert any preferences?
> 
> general clue, advice, ...  or pointers to where we might find same?
> 
> thanks.
> 
> randy
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> https://lists.cryptech.is/listinfo/tech
> 

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