What just happened? China Mobile just took the wraps off its new “super SIM card” and it’s rather fancy, packing a fully-fledged 32-bit RISC-V processor core clocked at 120MHz. It’s based on the CC2560A, a single-chip device from Texas Instruments, representing a massive upgrade over the modest SIM cards currently powering our smartphones.
For starters, the card offers 2.5MB of flash storage – a tenfold increase over regular SIMs and twice the capacity of existing super SIMs already deployed in IoT use cases, as highlighted by Tom’s Hardware. But the RISC-V CPU core is the real star of the show here. China Mobile claims it enables communication speeds up to 10x faster than a standard SIM, while providing double the raw compute power of other high-end super SIMs. The chipmaker rates algorithm performance at over 2x better on average.
The SIM also packs some serious security smarts baked in at the hardware level. Over 100 different hardening techniques are present, such as bus encryption, anti-side-channel defenses, sensitive signal masking, and physical anti-cloning capabilities, meeting EAL5+ certification standards.
With this SIM, China Mobile is targeting heavy-duty IoT and connected applications where resilience and advanced features are paramount. These include digital ID cards for students, smart car key systems, access control hardware, and facilitating digital payment services.
The super SIM card is also pretty robust from a connectivity standpoint. In addition to the traditional 7816 SIM interface, it touts SWP, QSPI, SPI, I2C, and UART interfaces to talk to all manner of radios, storage chips, biometric sensors, and more in a highly integrated package.
It’s worth highlighting here that China’s use of the RISC-V standard is being probed by the United States amid escalating tensions between the two nations, potentially putting a damper on future innovation with this platform. Lawmakers have raised concerns that the open instruction set architecture undermines efforts to limit advanced chip exports to China, as the free RISC-V license allows anyone, including Chinese firms, to design their own implementations.
Super SIM cards are growing in popularity in China. Last year, the People’s Bank of China unveiled new models for mobile users that provide digital wallet functions supporting central bank digital currency transactions. They even feature NFC support to enable digital ID scans.
