China Mobile has announced its upcoming CC2560A "super SIM card", the world's first SIM card with a RISC-V core onboard. The CC2560A is an IoT product which improves on every aspect of a traditional SIM card: more storage, better security algorithms, and new functionality like NFC support.
China Mobile, the largest mobile provider in the world, held a 5G IoT product conference on Wednesday. Among other IoT solutions and new releases, China Mobile announced the RISC-V super SIM. Powered by a single RISC-V core running at 120 MHz, the company claims the new SIM offers ten times the communication rate of a standard SIM card, around two times the rate of current high-end super SIMs already seeing use in the IoT field. The RISC-V SIM's onboard flash storage capacity of 2.5MB is also ten times larger than a standard SIM's storage and twice that of other super SIMs.
Unfortunately for the power phone users in the audience, average users will not be seeing the RISC-V super SIM in their devices anytime soon — not least because the card is a China Mobile exclusive which will possess intense security features and encryption. SIM cards are needed anytime a device needs to be uniquely identified over a network; the use case we are all familiar with is as an identifier within a smartphone to our phone carriers.
Super SIMs, considerably more powerful and versatile than traditional consumer SIMs, have already become an important product in the IoT field, allowing elite features such as multi-network connectivity and automatic network failover for highly connected devices. While thankfully your new smart fridge won't need a SIM card, super SIMs are popping up in shared rental scooters, fleet tracking devices, and digital billboards.
China Mobile's example use cases for the super SIM include electronic student ID cards, digital car keys, public transportation, and other instances regarding controlling access. The RISC-V powered super SIM is certainly a unique product; no one would think of a boosted CPU core on a SIM card besides a company aiming to gain the dollars of a hungry IoT field. Future innovation on the chip may not see the light of day, however; U.S. lawmakers are anxiously engaged in blocking China's access to the RISC-V protocol.
