Atmel's AT91SO25 secure MCU helps HomeATM get PCI 2.0 certification

SAN JOSE, USA: Atmel Corp. and HomeATM announced that the recent Payments Card Industry (PCI) 2.0 certification of HomeATM's Safe-T-PIN is the result of an efficient collaboration between the two leaders on their markets. HomeATM's Safe-T-PIN, powered by Atmel's AT91SO25 secure microcontroller, is the first ever Internet Pin Entry Device (PED) to achieve such certification.

Atmel's AT91SO25 dedicated features and Common Criteria EAL4+ security certification were instrumental in obtaining this first PCI 2.0 certification. This product is offered in a compact BGA144 package which brings high security and extended connectivity in a small footprint. Safe-T-PIN provides secure two factor authentication for e-commerce transactions and secure log-in.

Based on the ARM 32-bit SecureCore(TM) SC100 CPU core, Atmel's AT91SO devices are suited for highly secure systems such as card payment terminals. They achieve an outstanding level of integration of a wide array of peripherals.

They feature 256 KB of EEPROM, 100 KB of RAM and 32 KB of ROM, cryptography engines to accelerate DES/TDES, AES, SHA-n, RSA, elliptic curves as well as many flexible interfaces such as USB, SPI, UARTs, GPIOs, magnetic strip and smart card interfaces. All devices are the only ones on the market to be certified Common Criteria EAL4+.

Kenneth Mages, CEO at HomeATM stated: "PCI 2.0 specifications are much more demanding than the previous versions when it comes to protecting a POS system. The choice of Atmel's AT91SO25 Secure System-On-Chip has been really helpful to speed up and achieve our product certification."

Olivier Debelleix, Atmel's Marketing Manager for Embedded Security commented: "Our AT91SO products for secure systems have been used in many POS applications that have been certified towards previous versions of the PCI standard. HomeATM's PCI 2.0 certification demonstrates our products help to cope with the increasing demand for embedded security."