BIOS designer Phoenix Technologies has announced the release of its flagship UEFI BIOS product, Phoenix SecureCore Technology 3.0. The third generation of Phoenix SecureCore Technology UEFI BIOS features compatibility with native EDK II and EDK 1117 support for both x86 and ARM based systems.

Phoenix said that the SecureCore Technology inherits its code tree with fully modularized design from previous generations. In addition, the company's engineers re-architected the core for a universal build system in order to help firmware developers in transitioning to EDK II, the next generation foundation for the latest UEFI and PI specifications.



Starting with the Intel Z2760 Atom processor (codenamed Clover Trail), EDK II is the new standard for UEFI firmware development on Intel based platforms. The core of Phoenix SecureCore Technology 3 is based on native EDK II foundation support as well as extending the driver package inherited from EDK1117.

Phoenix SecureCore Technology 3.0 is also optimized for touch-enabled devices, with a new Windows 8 style GUI BIOS Setup and a customizable GUI core engine, Phoenix Desktop Manager (PDM). PDM is a graphic framework for the BIOS menu in Visual Forms Representation (VFR) designed for OEM branding.

With the new UEFI technology, Phoenix is aiming at Insyde Software - the largest vendor in the notebook BIOS industry - and American Megatrends, the largest in the desktop BIOS market.