A single-chip controller developed by STMicroelectronics and YouTransactor is presented as the first PCI (Payment Card Industry) secure SoC for mobile payment terminals to be based on a general-purpose microcontroller. The device embeds the physical security mechanisms required by PCI PTS (Pin Transaction Security), which include mesh monitoring, switch monitoring, support for secure application loading and secure boot, advanced cryptographic libraries, active software and hardware tamper detection with data-erase, card-data and pin-code protection, key management, and real-time clock (RTC) integrity protection.

Contact and contactless payment modes are all supported, and the chip comes pre-certified to PCI specifications to ease final approval of customers’ products. In addition to mobile point-of-sale (POS) terminals, the SoC can also be integrated in devices such as vending machines, IoT, cash registers, smartphones or retail hardware. Highlights of the MCU include 100DMIPS/273CoreMark processing performance, multiple power-management modes to help minimize overall energy consumption, large on-chip data and program memory, and ST’s Chrom-ART Accelerator to handle sophisticated user-interface graphics.

In addition, engineering teams benefit from the extensive STM32 development ecosystem, including initialization tools, free essential middleware and software, and graphical development tools available through the ST Partner program. To further aid development and accelerate time to market for innovative payment devices, ST and YouTransactor have also created a dedicated evaluation board and reference design containing the YTSECPCI.

For more information, visit www.youtransactor.com or www.st.com.

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