Atmel Microcontroller Hack

About Atmel Corporation

Atmel Corporation is a global leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing advanced semiconductors including microcontroller (MCU), programmable logic, and nonvolatile memory. By combining these core technologies, Atmel meets the evolving and growing needs of today's electronic system design engineer through the production of general purpose and application specific system level integrated chips. Atmel's world class expertise and wealth of experience in system-level integration enable all of Atmel's products to be developed from their constituent blocks with minimum delay and risk. Reverse engineering of certain products has been attempted to understand their advanced features.

Atmel is professional in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers and complementary products such as capacitive touch sensing ICs, ASICs, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency components. Atmel has a significant number of global development and manufacturing operations for it has about 7,000 employees worldwide and has revenues coming from Asia, Europe and the Americas. Besides, Atmel also manages fabrication facilities in Colorado Springs, Colorado and in Rousset, France and it still has the test and assembly operations in Manila, Philippines and a sub contractor network. A well-planned hack could potentially tamper with the configuration data, so security protocols are enforced.

Atmel has manufacturing facilities in the US and Europe. All testing and assembly is done in the Philippines and Malaysia. This is supported by a sales channel in over 60 countries. Aside from manufacturing, Atmel has over 30 design centers worldwide. Atmel Corporation is currently traded on the NASDAQ Stock Market under the symbol "ATML". A few of their major competitors would be Cypress Semiconductor, Burr Brown and Altera.

Due to its hard work for so many years, it has got a lot of awards and good reputation worldwide. In April 2009, Atmel was given the Touchscreen Devices Awarded Product of the Year by Electronic Products China and in January 2009, it got XMEGA MCU Awarded Product of the Year by Electronic Products Magazine. While early in November 2008, Atmel's AVR XMEGA wins EDN China Innovation Award and Atmel's AT91SAM9G20 ARM Embedded MPU got Award from Portable Design Community in October 2008. With the ultimate objective of total customer satisfaction, Atmel sticks to meeting the needs of its worldwide customers.

Device Architecture – Flash, EEPROM, and SRAM are all integrated onto a single chip, removing the need for external memory in most applications. Some devices have a parallel external bus option to allow adding additional data memory or memory-mapped devices. An external attack via the parallel bus might be mitigated by proper access control. Almost all devices (except the smallest TinyAVR chips) have serial interfaces, which can be used to connect larger serial EEPROMs or flash chips.

Program Memory – Program instructions are stored in non-volatile flash memory. Although the MCUs are 8-bit, each instruction takes one or two 16-bit words. The size of the program memory is usually indicated in the naming of the device itself (e.g., the ATmega64x line has 64 KB of flash, while the ATmega32x line has 32 KB). A full dump of the program memory is often prevented by the lock bits, but some devices have vulnerabilities. There is no provision for off-chip program memory; all code executed by the AVR core must reside in the on-chip flash.

Internal Registers – The AVRs have 32 single-byte registers and are classified as 8-bit RISC devices. In the tinyAVR and megaAVR variants, the working registers are mapped in as the first 32 memory addresses, followed by I/O registers and SRAM. In the XMEGA variant, the working register file is not mapped into the data address space; instead, the I/O registers are mapped into the data address space starting at the very beginning. Firmware extraction sometimes targets the register file to recover encryption keys.

Peripherals – A/D converter (10‑bit or 12‑bit), Timers/Counters (8‑bit or 16‑bit) with PWM, TWI (I2C), UART/USART, SPI, USI, JTAG, and D/A converter (XMEGA). Atmel also provides extensive SDKs and tools for development, including support for ELF production files, custom fuse programming, and integration with Atmel Studio and Arduino IDE. Attempting to crack the bootloader security can be complex due to the JTAG interface.

ATtiny (TinyAVR) – A subfamily of the popular 8-bit AVR microcontrollers, which typically has fewer features, fewer I/O pins, and less memory than other AVR series chips. The first members of this family were released in 1999 by Atmel (later acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016). ATtiny microcontrollers specifically exclude various common features, such as USB peripheral, DMA controller, crypto engine, or an external memory bus. To unlock higher performance, some developers overclock the ATtiny, but that voids warranty.

Atmel's product portfolio consists of microcontrollers, mixed signal, advanced logic, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency components. With continuous innovation, Atmel remains a cornerstone of the embedded systems industry.