The development of secure systems is critical for the automotive market. The Rust programming language, with its built-in support for memory-safe software development, is an important enabler for the design of mission-critical automotive software.
Infineon Technologies AG has taken the first step to create a Rust ecosystem in the embedded sector—making the company the first major semiconductor manufacturer to officially support Rust for its microcontrollers (MCUs). First up are the market-leading AURIX TC3xx and TRAVEO T2G automotive MCUs. While TRAVEO uses the official Rust tool chain and Arm Cortex-M targets, a dedicated Rust compiler has been developed for AURIX by Infineon’s tool partner HighTec EDV-Systeme. PSoC and AURIX TC4x support will follow in the second half of 2023.
The AURIX TC3xx and TRAVEO T2G microcontroller product families offer a wide range of integrated hardware functions for functional safety and cybersecurity. Introducing support for Rust complements these hardware features on the software side. Peripheral access crates (PACs) for AURIX and TRAVEO are provided for native access to microcontroller peripherals. The PACs are generated with the svd2rust tool and follow the same API standard for peripheral access. PACs are complemented with code examples demonstrating the use of Rust on Infineon MCUs and are available in GitHub.
Compared to C/C++, Rust is a new programming language developed by the open source community. The focus of Rust is on type safety and concurrency support. The programming language is designed to facilitate the development of safe and secure software by providing a convenient build system and the package manager “Cargo”.
