How good is their security? Did they improve over time?
Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#72[dead]
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#73Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.
> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors" That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition". Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serio…
"I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack [..]"
You must be kidding, right? It's not that they would have cared much in the past. Now, I would be the first to celebrate a change in that regard, but it's just not the world we live in now.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. TrustZone is a technology for resource isolation. At an extremely high nontechnical level, it's conceptually similar to memory protection.
The problem with TrustZone is that control of it always resides with a megacorp and never with the owner of the device. It's not that it isn't security at all, but rather that it's security against the owner.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every IoT device already uses esp chips, that's the only reason they can afford to make them. Them being low security doesn't matter, it's not like smart homes are secure now. Security is not important to IoT devices.
That's not true anymore. There was a shift to Beken Chips a year or two ago so a lot of your Amazon WiFi iot stuff uses that now (Tuya and Tasmota). Check out OpenBeken. I can't find much info on it but thinking it's cheaper than esp's probably more similar to esp8266 than esp32. Espressif chips are much more secure nowadays compared to the esp8266 days.
The beken ones don't have cheap Dev boards but I heard they are better sometimes. I don't know if they're better but DIY for them isn't so far.
I don't think security is a real problem for me. Smart devices on their own intranet takes away a lot of problems.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, the official Nordic devkits comes with a built-in debugger. Same for micro:bit. It's just plain USB. Right, the devkits can do this. If you want to go past that, like making your own PCB with a NRF52 on it you need JTAG, which is not a requirement for esp32. Maybe the NRF52 has some sort of ROM serial loader that I've missed though.
It’s actually possible to use the debugger on the NRF dev kits to flash/debug custom PCBs with NRF chips. So a separate (more expensive) JTAG debugger is in fact not required.
Yes nrf dev boards have an on board j-link, and Nordic provides instructions on how to turn the board into a programmer. Their licensing with segger explicitly allows this as long as you use it for other Nordic devices. Much cheaper than a standalone j-link.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.
You can get started with esp32 for $5. Nordic devkits are more expensive, and going past that requires a JTAG programmer, which is an expensive option for hobbyists and students. It's not surprising that they have taken off like they have. Initially it was because it was inexpensive, but now the community is huge and that is a very attractive selling point.
You can load Black Magic Probe firmware on a bluepill and have JTAG for about $2. I also ported it to nRF52840 if you have an extra dongle laying around. Or esp8266 for debugging over wifi (wireless JTAG is super useful sometimes.)
Segger has been really successful at marketing "JTAG == JLink" but it is just not true.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.
You can get started with esp32 for $5. Nordic devkits are more expensive, and going past that requires a JTAG programmer, which is an expensive option for hobbyists and students. It's not surprising that they have taken off like they have. Initially it was because it was inexpensive, but now the community is huge and that is a very attractive selling point.
ST-LinkV2s, including the $8USD clones, work on nRF. (StLink-V3 does not).
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#79Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.
TI has had the opportunity to engage the RISC-V community for several years and has, so far, declined to do so.
Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is risc-v really more power efficient at similar performance levels? I would think the ISA itself wouldn't matter that much for power efficiency, all things considered.
No, not inherently. The point is that simplicity and elegance enables efficiency.
Enables, but does not guarantee.
The PPC ISA is simple, but the POWER chips themsleves were never designed for power efficiency.
Likewise the ARM ISA is now associated with power efficiency, but there's nothing in the ISA itself that mandates power efficiency.
In fact, I'll bet a clever chip designer could design an x86 (or x86_64) chip that was low power. That would be a killer exercise. I want to say some of the third party licensees tried to do that with their x86 SoCs a long time ago. They failed for different reasons.