Progress in microelectronics pulls the technology market toward lower prices, higher performance, less power consumption, and smaller sizes. New microcontrollers on the market will be capable of more complex execution models, to keep up with the increasing complexity of the services running on a single device. When embedded devices become multi-functional, connected, and reprogrammable, the same paradigms adopted in other domains, such as servers and personal computers, must be applied and scaled down on microcontrollers.
The new generation of ARM Cortex-M microprocessors, which has recently been announced, will provide a broader range of configurable memory regions in the MCU, to extend the granularity of memory protection mechanisms, and an additional layer of execution isolation through the introduction of new execution modes within the trusted...
