I’ve just spent an amazingly busy and productive time at Cartes Paris, the biggest and the most comprehensive global annual event dedicated to Secure Solutions for Payment, Identification and Mobility. This year’s event was no different in bringing together the leading companies in the smartcard industry, including payments, telecoms, ID, PayTV and transport segments.
Continuing from our high profile presence at Cartes 2012, where STMicro had showcased their ST31 MCU product (the first SecurCore SC000 device in the market) through a very engaging demo, this year ARM decided to step up the ante and have its very own booth at the show.
The growing success of ARM SecurCore in the smartcard market is evident from the fact that about 1 in 7 smartcard devices shipped globally in 2012 were based on SecurCore. Our position is expected to be further strengthened in coming years as several of our licensees come to market with their SecurCore SC000 products. Every year the number of companies at Cartes talking about their ARM based products seems to grow larger, and this year was no exception. Close on the heels of STMicro’s SC000 based ST31 device launched last year, this year saw the emergence of the first SC000 based devices from the Chinese ARM licensee NationZ. To complement the increasing use of SecurCore in the Far East region, it was good to see the ecosystem around security growing as well, with companies from the region showcasing their JavaOS solutions for SC000 and SC300.
The main themes of our own ARM booth were the SecurCore family of ARM processors, the ARM TrustZone technology and for the first time at such a show, our ideas and solutions for the rapidly growing IoT and M2M markets where security is a strong underlying theme. These themes drew a lot of interest and the Security team from the ARM Processor Division, which includes yours truly, was kept incredibly busy by a steady stream of visitors wanting to learn more about our security IP portfolio. Through creative juggling of resource we also managed to squeeze in several productive 1-to-1 meetings with the major smartcard silicon vendors, OEMs, security evaluators and OS/software providers. All in all, it was time very well spent.
Those wanting to learn more about the event may wish to visit the event's main site http://www.cartes.com/
or for a daily digest of news and videos from the event http://www.itsinternational.com/event-news/cartes-2013/
Thanks for the write-up, Sumit. Secure is not an application area which occurs to many people when you mention ARM. To put you figure of "1 in 7" in perspective, how big is the annual market for smartcards?