▲NXP MCX MCU Portfolio (Image: NXP)

Advancing innovation in emerging industries and IoT edge applications

Proliferation of edge devicesMicrocontrollers (MCUs) have evolved dramatically over the past several decades. Today, next-generation intelligent applications are at the heart of many cutting-edge applications. However, developers are faced with a new class of MCUs that can navigate the complex landscape of power, performance, security requirements, and connectivity options while balancing total system cost and energy efficiency.

To address these challenges, NXP Semiconductors today announced its new MCX microcontroller portfolio, aimed at revolutionizing many emerging industrial and IoT edge applications, including smart homes and smart factories.

The portfolio includes four series of devices built on a common platform and supported by the widely adopted MCUXpresso development tools and software suite. NXP expects this portfolio to enable developers to maximize software reuse and accelerate development. It features the first example of NXP's new Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for accelerated inference at the edge, which the company claims delivers up to 30x faster machine learning throughput than CPU cores.

The MCX portfolio is built on a common foundation of core technologies and supported by a unified software suite that maximizes software reuse. The breadth of the MCX portfolio allows developers to select the device best suited to their application needs, allowing them to invest in design differentiation.

The four series in the MCX portfolio are designed to minimize development costs by maximizing ease of use, simplifying migration, scaling up or down based on needs, and maximizing software reuse.

NXP said it offers design flexibility by integrating a comprehensive set of peripherals based on high-performance Arm Cortex-M cores. MCX devices provide up to 4 MB of on-chip flash memory, a low-power cache, an advanced memory management controller, and up to 1 MB of on-chip SRAM to further enhance real-time performance of edge applications.

NXP's eIQ® ML software development environment supports machine learning and runtime inference. Developers leverage eIQ's easy-to-use tools to train and deploy machine learning models targeting NPUs or CPU cores onto MCUs. Built with NXP's security-by-design approach, the MCX family offers built-in secure boot capabilities, including immutable root of trust, hardware-accelerated encryption, and the edgeLock® security subsystem, which are available on select families.

“As we approach the milestone of 75 billion connected devices, we are entering a new era of edge computing,” said Ron Martino, vice president and general manager, Edge Processing, NXP Semiconductors. “This era requires us to fundamentally rethink how we can best design a flexible portfolio of MCUs that can serve as the foundation for energy-efficient industrial and IoT edge applications now and for decades to come.”

“The new MCX portfolio builds on our strong heritage of MCUs to deliver the performance and integration needed to address real-time workloads for the next wave of innovation,” he added.