Renesas Electronics and NXP Semiconductors N.V. join the Trusted Firmware Project

[Cambridge, Wednesday 25 March 2020] Trusted Firmware, the open governance community project hosted by Linaro Community Projects Division, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation and NXP® Semiconductors N.V. have joined the Trusted Firmware Project. Members to date include Arm, Cypress, Data IO, Futurewei, Google, Linaro, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments.

“With a forecasted one trillion embedded devices connecting to the cloud, Renesas wants to ensure its 32-bit microcontroller solutions are as secure as possible”, said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Marketing, IoT Platform Business Division at Renesas. “Joining the Trusted Firmware Project is the logical next step in securing our RA MCU Family featuring Arm® Cortex®-M processors.”

“NXP’s joining of the Trusted Firmware Project continues our commitment to delivering secure software enablement for our Arm Cortex-A and Cortex-M processors,” said Rob Oshana, vice president of Software Engineering R&D at NXP Semiconductors, “Embedded developers looking for a trusted code base can easily leverage the open source software available for our broad portfolio of Arm-based controllers.”

“The industry must take responsibility for ensuring trust is built into devices,” said Shebu Varghese Kuriakose, chairman of the board for the Trusted Firmware Project and senior software technology manager at Arm. “The Trusted Firmware Project was founded for the Arm ecosystem to collaborate on building secure software and solving the complexity of security at scale. New platinum members, Renesas and NXP, bring extensive and valuable experience to the project.”

The Trusted Firmware Project is designed to reduce porting and integration work across the ecosystem by creating reusable reference implementations for SoC and Trusted OS developers. The project collaborates on the development of Trusted Firmware-A (TF-A), Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M) and OP-TEE.

TF-A is the reference Secure world software for Arm Cortex-A and Arm Neoverse™ processors across all market segments. It provides a trusted boot flow and standard implementation of Arm SMCCC, PSCI, SDEI, SCMI, TBBR Specifications and PSA FF-A (SPCI). TF-M is the reference implementation of Platform Security Architecture (PSA) designed for Arm Cortex-M processors and meets the PSA Certified requirements, accelerating the route to certification. It provides Secure Boot and a set of Secure Services accessible via PSA Certified Functional APIs. OP-TEE is a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) designed as a companion to a non-secure Linux kernel running on Arm Cortex-A processors using Arm TrustZone® technology.

This gives SoC developers and OEMs a reference trusted code base complying with the relevant Arm specifications and forms the foundations of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on application processors, or the Secure Processing Environment (SPE) on microcontrollers. The collaborative design, development and validation amongst the project members allows faster and cost-effective deployment of secure devices.

For further information on the Trusted Firmware Project, visit trustedfirmware.org.

About Linaro Community Projects Division

Linaro Community Projects Division is the division of Linaro managing open source community projects with open governance. Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top ten company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10. To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit linaro.org and 96Boards.org.