China has developed the first SIM card with a RISC-V core for Internet of Things

China Mobile has announced its new “super SIM card” CC2560A, which is the world’s first SIM card with a RISC-V core. It is designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) and offers a significant improvement over traditional SIM cards.

The novelty has increased memory, improved security algorithms and new functions, such as NFC support.

With a single RISC-V core clocked at 120MHz, the super SIM card offers data transfer speeds 10 times faster than standard SIM cards and about 2 times faster than today’s high-end super SIM cards , which are already used in the field of IoT.

The built-in flash memory capacity of 2.5 MB is also 10 times larger than that of standard SIM cards and twice that of other super SIM cards.

Examples of Super SIM uses include electronic student cards, digital car keys, public transport systems and other access control applications.

However, the future development of this technology may be in question due to attempts by the US authorities to block China’s access to the RISC-V protocol.

RISC-V (“risk-five”) is an open instruction architecture of the central processor based on RISC principles. The project started in 2010 at the University of California (Berkeley), and many enthusiasts outside the university also joined the work.

RISC-V has 32 (in the embedded version – 16) registers for storing integers. If floating-point expansion is supported, the processor must support 32 floating-point registers. Processor instructions (with the exception of those that provide access to memory) operate only with registers.