MCUs target cellphone smart cards

Renesas Technology Corp. announced three 32bit smart card microcontroller (MCU) models—the AE56C, AE57C2 and AE58C1—incorporating large-capacity EEPROM together with mask ROM. The products are mainly used in smart cards such as third-generation mobile phone USIM cards and multi-application cards. Sample shipments will begin in April 2006 for the AE56C, May 2006 for the AE57C2, and July 2006 for the AE58C1 in Japan.

The new products incorporate an AE-5 32bit CPU core for smart card MCUs and use Renesas' proprietary MONOS (metal oxide nitride oxide silicon) EEPROM. EEPROM capacities of 72Kbytes in the AE56C, 144Kbytes in the AE57C2 and 288Kbytes in the AE58C1 are said to allow installation of multiple applications and storage of large volumes of data. The products also have 480KBytes of on-chip mask ROM, allowing for increased capacity requirements associated with general-purpose OS version upgrades and so forth.

The MCUs are provided with a 32bit CPU core, a DMAC supporting high-speed communications, a coprocessor for AES encryption and a coprocessor for modular exponentiation. All three products are fully compatible with the current AE-5 series. The E6000H full emulator and SE-I simple emulator are available as development tools.

Shipment is available in wafer or chip-on-tape form. Typical applications of the products include cellphone USIM cards, multi-application cards and security authentication terminals.