Infineon OPTIGA™ Trust M Board - Review

Table of contents

RoadTest: Infineon OPTIGA™ Trust M Board

Author: ajayvishaal

Creation date: 23 Sep 2020

Evaluation Type: Development Boards & Tools

Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True

What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?:

What were the biggest problems encountered?: Getting the demo codes of the board and Getting started with the board. Also the Dave IDE is very difficult to work with. Also the support for this board is less when compared to other XMC boards.

Detailed Review:

         First of all I wanna thank Element14 for giving the oppourtunity to roadtest this board. This is my first roadtest and I hope I tried my best in reviewing the kit. I wanna share some of my thoughts about this board. This boad is specially designed for industrial automation and it has an Optiga Trust M security chip for securing the data tranmitted to the cloud.

Unboxing:

         The kit includes the following components

• XMC4800 Relax kit

     Some of the features are

     -> XMC4800-F100X2048 Microcontroller

     -> ARM® Cortex®-M4 CPU 144MHz

     -> 2 MB of Flash

     -> 353 kByte RAM

     -> 100 pin package

     -> EtherCAT® connectivity

     -> On-board debugger

• OPTIGA™ Trust M

          The OPTIGA™ Trust M Shield2Go is equipped with OPTIGA™ Trust M security chip. It allows users to develop

system solutions by combining Shield2Go with My IoT adapter and XMC.

• Shield2Go Adapter

          The Shield2Go adapter is an evaluation board that allows users to easily combine different Shield2Go boards to

Arduino compliant ecosystem, for fast evaluation of IoT systems. With its solderless connectors, it allows users

to easily stack Shield2Go boards instead of soldering it. The shield design is derived from XMC2Go evaluation

board.

• USB cables

• Wifi ESP Click

• Additional Resistors

• 2x5 male and female angle headers

Testing: 

          I started with setting up the IDEs. The Dave IDE is very much difficult to work with and also I found that there is no support for XMC 4800 MCU in Arduino IDE. I tried programming the kit using Keil IDE and Dave IDE. I'll update about my experience in using the Optiga Trust M eval kit with Dave IDE and Keil IDE soon.

          Unfortunately, All the IDEs has very less support for XMC4800 MCU, I'm unable to test the board according to my plan. So, First I uploded the demo hex code found in this repo. The data cable is connected to the X102 port(Debug port) of the evaluation board. A Jlink flash software is used to upload the hex file to the Optiga Trust M Evaluation Board. A window will ask us to choose the target MCU to load the hex file.

          After choosing the desired MCU, another window will open up. We have to choose the file to be loaded into the MCU.

After selecting the file, click the "Program Device" button. Once the code get uploaded we get a done message.

          To check this code, Tera Term or any other serial monitor can be used. I'm using TeraTerm and now we have to change the data cable to the X100 port inorder to establish UART communication between PC and kit. Now open the Teraterm and select the COM port where the eval kit is connected.

After clicking "OK", we can work with the Optiga Trust M eval kit's secure shell UART.

Conclusion:

          Due to lack of support for this Optiga Trust M evaluation kit, I'm unable test the board according to my plan. However I faced many challenges and issues with the board. Some of the issues are

• Lack of good software and hardware support
• Lot of issues and errors in the demo codes found in github repository
• MCU gets hot within some seconds of powering up
• Dave IDE is very much compliated to work, Also lot of Dave examples are available for XMC4700 MCU and not for XMC4800 MCU
• Keil IDE requires number of additional packages to work with this kit also a profssional license is essential for uploading demo codes other than Blink demo codes
• There is no support for XMC4800 MCU in Arduino IDE, however other XMC series have lot of supporting documents as well as sample codes.
• The optiga trust m sample code in arduino IDE provided by the infineon for arduino boards is not compiling for any of the arduino boards, But it is mentioned in the github repo that the example code is compatible with all the arduino boards. This makes the shield2go adapter incompatible with the arduino boards.

     But this board has a lot to do with, If this board has support like other XMC series boards. It can be used for smart home automation and Industrial automation purposes.