NXP has released its first MCX N microcontroller product to lead a new era of smart and efficient edge processing.

NXP Semiconductor announced the MCX N94x and MCX N54x, the first product families of the N series in its new MCX microcontroller portfolio.

The MCX N is designed to simplify the design of secure intelligent edge applications, including IoT and industrial applications, and is the first instance of NXP's patented Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and the integrated EdgeLock® security subsystem.

The multi-core design of the MCX N series improves system performance and reduces power consumption by smartly and efficiently distributing the workload to analog and digital peripherals.

To transform edge data into edge intelligence, developers must increase processing power while minimizing the power budget to maintain an energy-efficient design.

The MCX N94x and MCX N54x product families, offering a selection of various analog and digital peripherals, provide the design flexibility and high performance necessary for engineers to create innovative designs while maintaining the low-power state required for advanced edge processing.

Rafael Sotomayor, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Edge Processing, Connectivity, and Security at NXP, said, “Developers“We aim to expand the scope of what is possible at the edge by creating new devices that enable better prediction and automation in mart homes, smart factories, and smart cities. To achieve this, we need more efficient, advanced MCUs that can safely perform all tasks by simplifying edge intelligence. From the perspective of the future of MCUs, the MCX N series provides a balance of power and performance for future IoT and industrial applications,” he said.

The MCX N series dual-core system combines full-performance Arm® Cortex®-M33 cores with streamlined Cortex®-M33 cores to manage control functions, allowing developers to run applications in parallel or turn off individual cores as needed to reduce power consumption.

For example, in secure IoT applications such as OTA (Over-the-Air) communication, the main core performs system security, while the streamlined core executes control functions.

The MCX N94x and MCX N54x are based on dual high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M33 cores running up to 150 MHz, and feature 2 MB of flash and full ECC RAM options, a DSP coprocessor for audio and voice processing, and an integrated NPU.

The integrated NPU can reduce latency and overall power consumption by providing up to 30 times faster machine learning throughput compared to a single CPU core as well as multiple co-processors and accelerators.

In addition, NXP’s eIQ® machine learning software development environment provides easy-to-use tools for training and supporting machine learning models using an integrated NPU.

The MCX N series devices also include a full set of peripherals. The MCX N94x includes a variety of high-end analog and motor control peripherals, whereas the MCX N54x includes peripherals ranging from high-speed USB with a PHY to SD or smart card interfaces suitable for IoT and consumer applications.

The new device is built following NXP's secure-by-design approach and provides secure booting through an immutable Root of Trust (RoT), hardware-accelerated encryption, and a built-in EdgeLock security subsystem.

The architecture supports on-site updates, online transactions, and overproduction prevention features for remote ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers).