The development of safe systems is fundamental for the automotive market. The Rust programming language – with its built-in support for memory-safe software development – is an important enabler for mission-critical automotive software design.
Infineon Technologies is taking the first step by creating a Rust ecosystem in the integrated sector. This makes the company the first major semiconductor manufacturer to officially support Rust for its microcontrollers.
The first are the AURIX TC3xx and TRAVEO T2G automotive MCUs. Although TRAVEO uses the official Rust toolchain and Arm Cortex-M targets, a dedicated Rust compiler was developed for AURIX by Infineon's tooling partner HighTec EDV-Systeme. PSoC and AURIX TC4x support will occur in the second half of 2023.
The AURIX TC3xx and TRAVEO T2G microcontroller product families offer a range of integrated hardware functions for functional safety and cybersecurity. The introduction of support for Rust complements these hardware features on the software side. Peripheral Access Boxes (PACs) for AURIX and TRAVEO are provided for native access to microcontroller peripherals.
PACs are generated with the svd2rust tool and follow the same API standard for peripheral access. The PACs are complemented with code examples that demonstrate the use of Rust on Infineon microcontrollers and are available on GitHub.
Compared to C/C++, Rust is a new programming language developed by the open source community. Rust's focus is on type safety and concurrency support. The programming language is designed to facilitate secure software development by providing a convenient build system and the “Cargo” package manager.
