While Symbian OS support is not included in the SH-Mobile announcement Renesas's market position and future product development both in terms NTT DoCoMo and the security support is an interesting indication of the likely roadmap for future smartphones.

Renesas was created in April 2003 through the merger of Hitachi's and Mitsubishi's semiconductor businesses. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor suppliers, and the world's largest supplier of microcontrollers. Renesas silicon account for half the application processors in mobile phones and it also supplies most of the ancillary components such as displays, memory, GSM amplifiers and RF components.

"The bulk of our high end processor currently services the featurephone market, those devices with cameras and multimedia capabilities," says Brian Davis, Director of Business Development, Advanced Solutions Group at Renesas Technology America, Inc. "However our future product line is very much intended to service the open operating systems that power the smartphone market."

The inclusion of CryptoCell in the SH-Mobile chipset has been driven mainly by demands from Renesas's customers. Amit Shofar, Director, Business Development at Discretix notes three strong areas where security is becoming increasingly important; DRM, Over-The-Air updates and commerce. We covered many of the issues in the DRM arena in our recent feature "Discretix Hardens DRM Security on Symbian OS ".

"Over the air firmware updates allow vendors or operators to efficiently introduce new capabilities and services or correct fault, significantly lowering operational support costs," says Amit. "Making these updates secure is key requirement. The basis of the entire handset security lies in the firmware. If an attacker can penetrate the firmware they can undermine any security measures applied in application software running on the device by replacing key firmware components." Hardware security is key to preventing firmware attacks for the same reason it provides robust security for any application, security keys and algorithms held in software can be attacked and changed. "Hardware based security allows you to do two things with certainty when it comes to firmware updates," says Amit. "Firstly you can ensure that the update packages are from legitimate sources and secondly ensure that the update has been completed successfully." The verification of the successful update of firmware is achieved by two key steps, firstly using hashing algorithms (again implemented in hardware) to check that the start image is the one expected and then repeating the process after an update to check that the expected image has been created.

Other important applications supported by hardware security, currently of less importance but rapidly growing, are mobile commerce and enterprise mobility, both areas which also can benefit from the robust security.

Amit also points out that the recently released specifications of the Trusted Mobile Platform organization, a group made up of NTT DoCoMo, Intel and IBM, makes hardware based security a key requirement for trusted class of mobile devices.

Renesas's SH-Mobile is the defacto standard processor in NTT DoCoMo's network, having a dominant portion of the DoCoMo 2.5G handset market and significant FOMA implementation but is also gaining an increasingly important role outside Japan. The integration of CryptoCell into the SH-Mobile product line has however been driven strongly by the Japanese market, particularly DoCoMo. "We are seeing a strong demand for security on handsets, particularly in the 3G application space," says Brian. "Security is certainly high on NTT DoCoMo's requirements list to allow it to drive new applications. We saw a merging of customer requirements with the capabilities of Discretix's technology which drove our integration of CryptoCell into the SH-Mobile product line."

While SH-Mobile is today predominantly a featurephone chipset, the future roadmap is heading towards smartphone support, and in doing so is bringing some critical advantages gained from designing for devices with lower specifications. For example the SH-Mobile 3, which utilizes the SH-Mobile X Core, is a super scalar chipset able to execute two instruction in one cycle, either one RISC and one DSP instruction or two RISC instructions in parallel. "The approach we have taken in the SH-Mobile X Core, unlike others who are aggressively increasing clock speed, is a power efficient one," says Brian. "Increasing the clock speed also increases power consumption exponentially, where our architectural approach to performance provides more horsepower without compromising power consumption. This is important particularly for Multimedia applications. As digital media broadcasting to mobile phones becomes a reality you need to maintain good battery life for it to be practical."

The technology in SH-Mobile will also offer other benefits in the smartphone market. "We have worked hard to optimize performance of multimedia in SH-Mobile," says Brian. "In addition to the chipsets architectural we also have particularly efficient video and audio codeces."

Currently Renesas is able to offer a full one-stop shop to device manufacturers, from silicon to applications, however this will change as it increases support for open operating systems. "We currently have agreements in place with Monta Vista for Linux support," says Brian. "We are also in discussions with Symbian as, while the Smartphone market is a very small part of our current business, we expect it to grow. We want broad open operating system support available for SH-Mobile to fulfill the requirements of our customers."

While the importance of Renesas's decision to incorporate CryptoCell into SH-Mobile for Symbian OS smartphone is not immediately obvious, by putting together Renesas's strengths in NTT DoCoMo market, DoCoMo's adoption of Symbian OS for future handsets and the fact that DoCoMo are very much at the leading edge of mobile phone technology and applications, this announcement says that security is a key ingredient of future smartphones. Symbian OS with support from DoCoMo and Discretix is well positioned to deliver the new breed of secure applications.

Read the joint press release here. More information on Renesas is available from www.renesas.com and on Discretix from www.discretix.com.