Building on the strength of more than 20 years of industry-leading Kinetis and LPC portfolios, the MCX portfolio debuts a new generation of scalable, secure and developer-focused microcontrollers. The Arm Cortex-M based MCX portfolio is purpose-built on a common foundation of core technologies that support vast industrial and IoT use cases. These 32-bit, flash-based microcontrollers provide expanded product capabilities with memory scalability and a broad package offering. A simplified system design offers optimal enablement and intelligent peripherals for the intelligent edge including: machine learning, wireless, voice, motor control, analog and more. The portfolio also features the first instantiation of NXP’s new, specialized neural processing unit (NPU) for accelerating inference at the edge, delivering up to 30x faster machine learning throughput compared to a CPU core alone.
The new MCX MCU portfolio features four new series of devices supported by NXP’s widely adopted MCUXpresso suite of software and development tools to simplify product development.
The MCX N Advanced series is designed for secure, intelligent applications, with families that include an integrated EdgeLock secure subsystem and dedicated NPU with a high efficiency compute architecture for real-time inference.
The MCX A Essential series is optimized to provide critical functionality for a broad range of applications where cost constraints and time to market are key considerations.
The MCX W Wireless series offers low-power narrowband connectivity, including Bluetooth Low Energy. Designed to simplify adding wireless connectivity to IoT devices, its energy-efficient radio helps extend the battery life of small connected systems.
The MCX L Ultra-Low Power series is designed for power-critical applications. With one of the industry’s lowest dynamic power consumption offerings, these devices can help extend battery life significantly compared to traditional MCUs.
Machine learning and run-time inference will be supported by NXP’s eIQ ML software development environment. Developers can utilize the easy-to-use tools offered by eIQ to train ML models targeting either the NPU or the CPU core and deploy them on the MCU. MCX families that are built following NXP’s security-by-design approach will offer a secure boot with an immutable root-of-trust, hardware-accelerated cryptography and, on select families, a built-in EdgeLock secure subsystem.