STxP70/STHORM/P2012 – ST's secret microcontroller

Modern sensors seem to quite useless with something able to crunch the numbers, so this is becoming increasingly common.

TI’s mmWave sensors (IWR series) incorporate a top of the line C674x DSP core that is clocked at 600MHz.

The ever popular MPU6050 IMU from Invensense (Now TDK) contains a processor for fusing the output of the gyroscope and the accelerometer into an attitude estimate. Like the STxP70, this processor's firmware is a blob that's loaded over SPI/I2C on startup.

There are a few versions of the blob floating around the internet and its features are anything but well-documented. Example:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66324744/setting-initial...

"This hardware platform comes along with different simulators that allows to test parallel programs on regular computers. Both the hardware platform and the simulators are described in the following sections." [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedde...

Pretty wild how even basic sensors have CPUs with firmware running on them.

I can imagine a side channel attack where you give inputs to the sensor that translate to machine code to exploit some weakness in that CPU firmware.

What a time to be alive.

What is ST in this context? Apparently not Atari ST.