Arm is the architecture of choice for the IoT, providing the computing power behind 125 billion chips to date. Today the company announced a new IoT solution to accelerate the development of secure SoCs, which has been built on PSA principles.

The Platform Security Architecture (PSA) was developed to ensure that the increasingly diverse connected devices that communicate with each other are designed with a common secure foundation. PSA builds on four key principles (device identity, trusted boot sequence, secure OTA updates and certificate-based authentication). Despite this, SoC design remains a complex process, which can take years to get right.

Arm's new IoT solution, the SDK-700 System Design Kit, is a SoC system framework for designing secure SoCs for rich IoT nodes, gateways, and embedded applications. This solution enables Arm's partners to build secure devices within a common software development environment, while enabling the diversity and differentiation for their business to thrive in new IoT applications.

The SDK-700 supplies a secure SoC framework foundation for Microsoft Azure Sphere, announced at RSA this week. This allows SoC designers to use SDK-700 to bring Azure Sphere SoCs to market quickly.

The SoC delivers a flexible compute architecture combining the performance of Cortex-A with the high efficiency and real-time capability of Cortex-M processors. The Cortex-A processor enables a rich development environment such as Azure Sphere OS or Linux OS. It incorporates a new flexible subsystem, based on PSA principles, designed to save time-to-security and reduce risk for SoC developers.

In addition to a common development environment with little fragmentation risks, along with access to a huge ecosystem of software, OS and tools, including Trusted Firmware, the SDK-700 provides:

• A flexible secure hardware foundation integrating subsystem, processors and key secure building blocks for an SoC meeting the requirements of Azure Sphere
• A standardized programming interface for inter-processor communication
• Pre-built security IP including firewalls, secure enclave and Arm TrustZone technology
• The subsystem can be configured in many ways, allowing a trusted connection to any cloud