NXP MCX Industrial and IoT Microcontrollers

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 secure connected edge including: machine learning, wireless, voice, motor control, analog and more. The portfolio also features the first instantiation of NXP’s new, specialized eIQ® Neutron 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 MCUXpresso Developer Experience to simplify product development.

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 to train ML models targeting either the eIQ Neutron NPU or the CPU core and deploy them on the MCU.

MCX families that are built following NXP’s secure-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 Enclave Core.

• MCX N Neural Series is designed for secure, intelligent applications, with families that include an integrated EdgeLock® Secure Enclave Core and dedicated eIQ Neutron NPU with a high-efficiency compute architecture for real-time inference.
• MCX A All-purpose series is optimized to provide critical functionality for a broad range of applications where cost constraints and time to market are key considerations.
• MCX W Wireless series offers 2.4 GHz narrowband connectivity for point to point and networked communications with enablement for Zigbee, Bluetooth LE, Thread and Matter protocols.
• MCX L 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.

The MCX portfolio is not a replacement for Kinetis and LPC portfolios. MCX is a new NXP portfolio that was purpose-built based on our rich history and knowledge of microcontrollers. Our Kinetis and LPC portfolios have been experiencing record demand and are still relevant devices in our industry.

Just like Kinetis and LPC, MCX MCUs will be supported by our MCUXpresso software and tools. Existing Kinetis and LPC users will find the software development kit (SDK) within MCUXpresso to be very similar, with the difference being at the hardware abstraction layer (HAL); the rest of the drivers are identical.

NXP has one of the broadest offerings of Arm®-based products. The MCX portfolio extends our existing microcontroller offering including Kinetis and LPC. When higher performance is needed and/or off-chip flash is desired, i.MX RT Crossover MCUs MCUsare the recommended devices. Beyond the crossover portfolio, i.MX applications processors offer even higher performance and support open operating systems like Linux OS.

The eIQNeutron NPU is a highly scalable accelerator core architecture providing machine learning (ML) acceleration. The architecture provides power and performance-optimized NPUs integrated with NXP's very wide portfolio of microcontrollers and applications processors.

Optional system-level components such as tightly coupled memory, DMAs, data mover cores, control cores and weight compression decompression technology for optimal processing throughput.

The eIQ Neutron NPUs offer support for a wide variety of neural network types such as CNN, RNN, TCN and Transformer networks and more. ML application development with the eIQ Neutron NPU is fully supported by the eIQ machine learning software development environment.

eIQ Neutron is designed to deliver up to 40x faster machine learning throughput compared to a CPU core alone. It is an internal NXP development that provides flexibility to tune the NPU to better meet our customer needs and provides the ability to offer better ongoing support for changing applications and operator support needs when deployed.

eIQ Neutron NPU N1-16 relative acceleration

The EdgeLock Secure Enclave, Core Profile in select MCX families comprises the immutable core security functionality. It is part of the silicon root of trust and features side-channel protected cryptographic acceleration engines, key management and device attestation.

Pre-configured security and key management policies enable device makers to simplify the path to certification and avoid costly mistakes and save development time.