Powerful security in a small footprint
Reduce product launch time by up to 6 months
Maxim Integrated Korea announced the 'MAX32558', which provides powerful security features.

The recent trend toward miniaturization and increased connectivity in electronic devices has led to a rise in threats to personal information. Consequently, manufacturers have increasingly prioritized security in their designs. Designers face the challenges of protecting against hacking at the device level, enhancing security within minimal board space, and addressing design complexity before launch.

Manufacturers of industrial, consumer, computing, and IoT devices can now take advantage of fast and efficient secure encryption, integrated key storage, and active tamper detection in up to 50% less PCB space with the MAX32558, the latest member of Maxim's DeepCover family of secure microcontrollers.

The MAX32558 DeepCover ARM Cortex-M3 flash-based secure microcontroller delivers robust security in a small footprint while simplifying design integration and accelerating time to market. It also supports multiple communication channels, including USB, Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), and I²C, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Maxim's experience and technological prowess in the payment terminal authentication field shortens the customer authentication process period from the previous 12-18 months to just 6 months.

Boasting robust security, the MAX32558 is a secure key storage solution that protects sensitive data. It integrates multiple security features, including secure key storage, a secure bootloader, active tamper detection, and a secure cryptographic engine, into a compact package and is compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 and Level 4 certifications.

The MAX32558 offers a highly integrated solution in a small footprint. Compared to secure authenticators, the MAX32558 provides 30x more general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins in a wafer-level package (WLP) with the same PCB footprint (4.34mm x 4.34mm). Competing solutions offer similar functionality but in a much larger package (8mm x 9mm Ball-Grid Array 121 (BGA121)). Despite its small footprint, the MAX32558 integrates a variety of security features to address the Point-of-Sale (POS) payment card industry's Personal Identification Number Transaction Security (PCI-PTS) requirements, as well as multiple analog interfaces. The solution offers 512KB of embedded flash and 96KB of embedded SRAM.

The MAX32558 features a comprehensive software framework with a simple, integrated design. The evaluation kit includes a real-time operating system (RTOS) and numerous example code examples, and a shared API software library within the same family facilitates code portability between devices. An EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) Level 1 stack for pre-certified smart card interfaces is also provided. The solution contains extensive documentation and code to manage the device lifecycle, including secure firmware signing and device personalization.

“Maxim continues to integrate the features and interfaces required for next-generation device designs, including advanced features that consumers can trust with their personal information,” said Gregory Guez, executive director of the Micros, Security and Software Business Unit at Maxim Integrated. “The MAX32558 significantly reduces the size of the device, saving board space while maintaining superior security features. Additionally, our deep security expertise accelerates time to market by up to six months.”