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Zhang Tong

A Chinese state laboratory has unveiled what it says is a self-contained microcomputer that is 100 times more resistant to hackers than standard models.
State-owned Science and Technology Daily reported on Friday that Purple Mountain Laboratories released its hacker-resistant microcontroller unit (MCU) at an academic conference in Nanjing earlier this month.
An MCU is a microcomputer mounted on a single chip and is widely used in industries such as energy and transport to perform simple control tasks.
The developers said the new MCU – about the size of a US quarter – had three cores rather than one, allowing two to function normally if one was attacked, according to the report.
“This development marks the end of an era of vulnerable MCUs,” Wu Jiangxing, project lead and the lab’s chief scientist, was quoted as saying.
Since 2013, Wu has been looking at ways to incorporate security into chips from the beginning rather than adding them afterwards.

The report said the MCU, known as the ESC0830, took two years to develop and would cost about as much as industry competitors without the security feature.
Li Yu, deputy director of Purple Mountain Laboratories’ Endogenous Safety and Security Research Centre, told Science and Technology Daily that the MCU’s major design feature was compatibility.
“It can seamlessly replace existing chips on the market without the need for changes to peripheral circuits, substantially saving on corporate expenses,” Li was quoted as saying.
The MCU project is part of a national key research and development project led by State Grid.
The laboratory, located in Nanjing in the eastern province of Jiangsu, was founded by the government in 2018 and conducts research on network communication and security. The lab has links with a range of industrial partners.
The lab did not respond immediately to a request from the Post for additional information.




MCUs can be found in household appliances such as rice cookers, washing machines, and televisions, and are known for their low power consumption and high reliability.
The potential for these devices to be manipulated came to the fore in September with a series of explosions across Lebanon involving walkie-talkies, smartphones and pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah.
According to the BBC, there was speculation that hackers may have broken into the MCUs of these devices and operated them remotely, causing them to overheat and detonate pre-installed explosives.
MCUs have long had a range of security features, including hardware encryption and random number generation, with advanced versions used in industrial control and financial payment systems.
“Certain security functions are tailored to specific application needs, providing basic protections,” said Tang Wei, a Beijing-based computer security expert.
Tang said chip security was not limited to MCUs – it was increasingly integral to more complex chips. For instance, when upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Microsoft requires computer processing units to support a standard microcontroller called TMP 2.0.
Tang said the Purple Mountain Laboratories’ MCU could have a price advantage in the marketplace.
“This newly developed MCU is poised to offer a low-cost alternative, particularly for domestic projects focusing on self-reliance in technology,” he said.


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Purple Mountain Laboratories says its new self-contained microcomputer is much more secure and ready to plug and play in industry


Purple Mountain Laboratories says its new self-contained microcomputer is much more secure and ready to plug and play in industry.
