Based on the company's MirrorBit technology and said to offer the highest level of commercially available protection with hardware-based encryption for mobile handsets, the package will be available in volume by the second half of the year.

According to Patrick Le Bihan, head of the product definition and alliances group at Spansion's wireless division, the company has worked closely with baseband chip manufacturers as well as handset makers and operators on the security enhancement.

"In general it is agreed that handset security needs to catch up with other advances in mobile phones," La Bihan told EE Times Europe . "We will only make significant progress here if the whole chain is involved in sharing information on aspects such as code sharing."

La Bihan said the susbsystem is just part of a roadmap at Spansion and a second generation version is scheduled for next year that will also take in mobile commerce and content applications. Over time, the aim is to embed a range of encryption, authentication and other security features inside Spansion Flash memory solutions, enabling protection of data, content and code.

Spansion worked with Israeli mobile security specialist Discretix on the approach that integrates encryption and authentication directly with the memory package, with Discretix supplying its CryptoFlash technology.

Traditionally, security in handsets has been handled in software and the baseband processor, which the companies say are inherently vulnerable to system attacks. Spansion says its approach will safeguard across multiple zones of memory such as separate, secured areas for the user, for the operator, for content rights objects and for the handset manufacturer with the potential to assign up to 16 zones. It ads the solution is operating system and chipset independent, enabling handset designers to speed time to market and save on development costs.

Depending on the handset configuration, the MCP being readied would include: MirrorBit NOR Flash memory, MirrorBit ORNAND flash memory, Spansion 7000C Processor, pSRAM and/or DRAM.

The solution incorporates all the main Trusted Environemnt security algorithm requirements as laid down by the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) initiative, including the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government; the Secure Hash Algorithms (SHA), cryptographic hash functions designed by the National Security Agency, including SHA-1 and SHA-2; RSA, an algorithm for public-key encryption; and a digital random number generator