NXP Launches New MCX Microcontroller Product Portfolio

     NXP Semiconductors officially released a new MCX microcontroller product portfolio, aiming to promote innovation in smart homes, smart factories, smart cities, and many emerging industries and edge applications of the Internet of Things. The product portfolio consists of four series, which are built on a common platform and supported by widely used MCUXpresso development tools and software suites. Based on this, developers can fully use unified software in the product portfolio to speed up development. This product portfolio also integrates for the first time NXP's new specialized neural processing unit (NPU) used to speed up edge reasoning, which can provide up to 30 times the machine learning throughput compared with a separate CPU core.

     Due to the rapid increase of edge devices, MCU has undergone tremendous changes in the past decades. Although MCU is the core of many edge applications today, the new generation of intelligent applications put forward higher requirements for MCU to help developers meet the complex requirements of power, performance and security, master various connection options, and balance the total system cost and energy efficiency. The MCX product portfolio is built on a number of core technologies and supported by unified software tools to help customers more flexibly meet a series of design challenges. MCX provides a wide and rich product portfolio, enabling developers to select suitable equipment according to their application needs, so that they can devote their energy to other aspects of the design.

     Ron Martino, executive vice president and general manager of edge processing technology of NXP, said: "As we get closer to the milestone of 75 billion connected devices, we are also entering a new era of edge computing. This requires us to fundamentally rethink how to build a flexible MCU product portfolio in a reasonable way. The product portfolio should be scalable, optimized, and able to become the foundation of energy-saving industries and edge applications of the Internet of Things today and in the coming decades. With our rich experience in the MCU field This new product portfolio will meet the performance and integration requirements of real-time workloads and lead a new wave of innovation. "

     The four series of MCX product portfolio focus on ease of use in the design, which can simplify the migration process, expand or simplify the design as required, and reduce the development cost as much as possible through the use of unified software tools. The product portfolio is based on the high-performance Arm Cortex-M core and integrates a wealth of peripherals to achieve design flexibility. MCX microcontroller products integrate up to 4 MB of on-chip flash memory, low-power cache and advanced memory management controller, and also provide up to 1MB of on-chip SRAM, which can further improve the real-time performance of edge applications.

     Machine learning and runtime reasoning will be implemented by NXP's eIQ  The machine learning software development environment provides support. Developers can use the easy-to-use tools provided by eIQ to train machine learning models for NPU or CPU cores and deploy them on MCU. The MCX series built according to NXP's "design ensures security" method will provide a secure boot with an immutable trust root and hardware accelerated encryption, and specific series also provide built-in EdgeLock ® security subsystem