Freescale addresses smart meter applications with new Kinetis M series
Looking to 'redefine' smart meter design, Freescale has launched the Kinetis M series of 32bit, ARM Cortex-M0+ based mcus.
The devices combine a sophisticated analogue front end, hardware tamper detection and low power operation to enable the design of secure, high accuracy one, two and three phase electricity metering solutions.
While traditional smart metering designs typically employ two chips to separate user billing software from the main application code, the Kinetis M series mcus handle this task with a single chip due to their on chip memory protection unit, peripheral bridge, protected GPIO and DMA controller.
To guard against external tampering, the devices include active and passive tamper pins with automatic time stamping throughout, including on the independent real time clock.
A random number generator enables faster, easier implementation of encryption algorithms than software implementations.
