Cortus today announced that Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research In Motion Limited (RIM), and an industry leader in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) security has licensed the Cortus APS3 CPU for use in their hardware security technology. This technology enables chip manufacturers and other rights holders to securely manage their assets from the silicon foundry to their consumers. The Cortus APS3 processor was chosen for its ease of integration for custom functionality, excellent code density, low power and small footprint.

“The Cortus APS3 was a good fit for our design.” said Dan O’Loughlin Director of Hardware Technology at Certicom. “The APS3 helped us meet our design goals and provided the required processing performance. The APS3 co-processor interface allowed the integration of our specific algorithm elements directly into the instruction set enabling efficient firmware to be developed.”

Mike Chapman, CEO of Cortus, said “We are delighted to be able to offer a cost effective solution to Certicom that enables them to gain silicon space and power consumption. Our processor cores are a perfect fit with Certicom’s technology and provides a high quality, simple to use solution they can offer their customers.”

The Cortus APS3 is a fully 32-bit processor designed specifically for embedded systems. It features a tiny silicon footprint (the same size as an 8051), very low power consumption, high code density and high performance. A full development environment is available, which is available for customization and branding for final customer use. The ecosystem around the APS3 is rich and well developed, it includes a full development environment (for C and C++), peripherals typical of embedded systems, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions such as cache and memory management units. For the most demanding designs the APS3 can be used in a multi-core configuration. The APS3 processor core is currently in production in a range of products from security applications to ultra low power RF designs.

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