Memory vendor Spansion has grouped a security controller IC with flash and SRAM on a multi-chip-package to offer the mobile handset market an extra level of protection against thieves.

Jeremy Werner, solutions delivery marketing manager for Spansion's wireless systems division, said that a lack of security in the wireless chipset has up until now made it easy for thieves to steal cell phones and resell them in other countries or "re-flash" the devices to fool service provider networks to provide services for free.

"We have stats that say 700,000 cell phones are stolen annually in the U.K. and it is responsible for a quarter of street muggings," said Werner.

Having this new level of security in cell phones, according to Werner, will speed the viability and availability of new mobile features such as virus recovery that will reboot the protected settings and data if a cell phone or PDA is infected with a virus. The technology will also help advanced SIM lock features to make stolen phones useless to thieves. It will also further secure access control to help cell phone users gain entry to their cars or home, as well as help users perform financial transactions securely with their cell phones, said Werner.

The new MCP will group a Spansion-developed security controller device with a NOR for boot up, with a version of the company's recently announced storage device, OrNAND, and small block of pSRAM/DRAM.

Using the Spansion security MCP instead of a traditional NOR and NAND or even hybrid NAND approach adds flash tamper protection to the mobile device and reduces the workload the CPU is required to perform.

Thieves can in theory still remove information from the memory devices in the MCP but doing so, said Werner, would be a complex task requiring the thieves disassemble the MCP with millions of dollars of equipment.

Werner noted that thus far there are no plans to allow customers to swap out any of the Spansion ICs on security MCPs with third party flash devices, say, for example a lower cost vanilla NAND device.

The company does, however, plan on offering MCPs for multiple markets.

"We will be doing security devices across numerous markets," Werner noted. "The first family of products is aimed at cell phones and PDAs."

The company expects to raw sample of the products in Q4, MCP samples in the first half of 2007 and full production by the end of the year.

By: DocMemory
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