Microsoft Azure Sphere and MediaTek MT3620 provide a secure and versatile IoT platform

MediaTek and Microsoft have collaborated to create the first SoC that's part of Microsoft’s new Azure Sphere solution. Azure Sphere is designed to create highly-secured, connected MCU powered devices at a price that makes enterprise-class security affordable for the multitude of cloud connected devices.

As an extremely versatile IoT platform that's applicable to a wide range of potential applications, the MT3620 enables devices to be created within this immediate ecosystem. It invites potential business and industrial bodies that need a solution from large, well-established partners and platform creators; which is where Microsoft and MediaTek can together provide a clear advantage.

MT3620: Powerful, secure with a wide range of potential applications

Inside the MT3620 is a highly integrated, high performance IoT application platform with a dedicated security engine, high Performance Arm® Cortex®-A7 AP with large caches and SRAM, and Arm® Cortex®-M4 with FPU sub-processors. The two Cortex-M4 with FPU for the I/O subsystems can also be used for general purpose computation and control.

Two general purpose I/O subsystems support the requirements of the many on-chip peripherals including 5x UART/I2C/SPI, 2x I2S, 8x ADC, up to 12 PWM counters and up to 72x GPIO, allowing an extensively diverse application potential. A 1x1 dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi radio subsystem provides external connectivity.

Besides this, the MT3620 contains an isolated security subsystem that handles secure boot and secure system operation. Operation of the MT3620 security features and Wi-Fi networking are isolated from, and run independently of, end user applications. Only hardware features supported by the Azure Sphere Secure IoT Platform are available to MT3620 end-users. As such, security features and Wi-Fi are only accessible via defined APIs and are robust to programming errors in end-user applications regardless of whether these applications run on the Cortex-A7 or the user-accessible Cortex-M4 with FPU.