Microcontrollers boast advanced security capabilities

19th April 2016

Mick Elliott

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The KL8x family of Kinetis L Series microcontrollers from NXP are available at Mouser Electronics. These ultra low-power microcontrollers combine the exceptional energy efficiency and ease-of-use of the ARM Cortex-M0+ core with the performance, peripheral sets, enablement, and scalability of the Kinetis 32-bit microcontroller portfolio.

The KL8x microcontroller family offers the security, scalability, and flexibility to address the challenges of creating smart devices for applications such as building control, home automation and security, Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, mobile point-of-sale systems, portable healthcare and wearables.

The microcontrollers extend the Kinetis microcontroller portfolio with advanced security capabilities — including support for public key cryptography and hardware Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) acceleration with side band attack protection — while maintaining a high level of compatibility with previous Kinetis devices, enabling lower power and cost migration path with the same level of security.

The devices feature low-power operation with dynamic currents down to 125µA/MHz in Run mode and down to 272 nA in Stop mode (while retaining RAM and RTC).

The microcontrollers have 128KBytes flash space and 9 KBytes SRAM, plus an integrated QuadSPI interface that supports connections to non-volatile memory (serial NOR), allowing developers to expand beyond the boundaries of a traditional microcontroller.

With the extended memory resources and new security features, design engineers can safely and quickly enhance their embedded applications with greater capability.

Mouser is also stocking two development tools for the KL8x family of microcontrollers.

The NXP TWR-KL82Z72M Tower System module is an evaluation, demonstration, and development board that features a 96MHz Kinetis KL82 low-power microcontroller. The TWR-KL82Z72M module can operate either as a stand-alone board or as a part of the NXP Tower System, a modular development platform that enables rapid prototyping and tool re-use through reconfigurable hardware.

The NXP FRDM-KL82Z Freedom Development Platform is an ultra-low-cost development platform that features a KL82Z microcontroller and supports a power supply voltage ranging from 1.71V to 3.6V.

It includes the OpenSDA open standard embedded serial and debugging adapter and offers several options for serial communications, flash programming, and run control debugging.