Lifecycle security and Trustzone management for Renesas RA MCUs

Author: EIS Release Date: Apr 27, 2022

Segger has tied up with Renesas to add DLM (device lifecycle management) and Trustzone partitioning during mass production for Renesas’ Arm Cortex-M33 based RA4 and RA6 microcontrollers.

 

Segger_Flasher-Renesas_RA_Cortex-M33

The new features are additions to Segger’s ‘Flasher’ line of in-circuit programmers, and are available to owners of existing Flashers as a software update with “no charge, no license cost and no hidden fees”, said Segger.

 

Renesas’ DLM controls the debug and serial programming capability of RA family MCUs from

development, through production and on to end-of-life. In production, the DLM state can be configured to deny future debug access and separately to deny future boot mode access.

 

With TrustZone-enabled MCUs (Cortex-M33 has Trustzone-M), firmware is protected by an authenticated lifecycle state transition process based on wrapped key management – for non-Trustzone versions DLM is based on plain text MCU debug identification code.

 

Segger’s Flasher family includes professional in-circuit programmers for service environments, prototyping and mass production. They program flash inside microcontrollers as well as QSPI non-volatile memories.

 

“The Flasher, once configured, can work in stand-alone mode. No third-party tools are required.” They also work via USB or Ethernet, and work with Linux, macOS or Windows.