reserving a portion of a volatile memory on a system on chip (SOC) including one or more processors;

decompressing at least a portion of the firmware code from a non-volatile memory;

programming one or more volatile memory access control registers to remove write access to the reserved portion of the volatile memory;

programming a memory activation table (MAT), wherein the MAT includes a set of memory access controller register addresses and values of the memory access controller register addresses; and

communicating an address of the reserved portion of the volatile memory and the MAT to a trusted execution engine (TEE) on the SOC.