NXP Unveils Its Lowest-Power MCX Microcontrollers Yet, the MCX L14x and MCX L25x
The company's first dual power domain microcontroller, the L25x includes a real-time coprocessor for always-on sensing.
NXP Semiconductors has announced its lowest-power MCX-family microcontrollers yet, the MCX L14x and MCX L25x — drawing a third the power of their predecessors, with clock speeds up to 96MHz.
"As intelligent sensors continue to proliferate, we're moving towards a world that anticipates and automates based on continuous environmental condition monitoring – making low power capabilities absolutely essential," claims NXP's Charles Dach by way of background to the company's latest devices, being demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. "The MCX L series represents a significant leap in making intelligent sensors more energy efficient, enabling longer operational times, new form factors and faster innovation."
The MCX L-series microcontrollers are built around an Arm Cortex-M33 core, running at up to 48MHz in the MCX L14x range and up to 96MHz in the MCX L25x range — the latter also adding an ultra-low-power coprocessor in the form of a Arm Cortex-M0+ core running at up to 10MHz, designed to run as an always-on sense controller. Memory capacities vary by model, ranging from 8kB to 64kB on the L14x or 128kB on the L25x of on-chip static RAM (SRAM) and 64kB to 256kB or 512kB of flash respectively.
Both chip families are designed for ultra-low-power operation, coming in at a claimed one-third the draw of equivalent existing MXC-series microcontrollers — as low as 24µA/MHz on the MCX L25x, the company says, for "representative workloads" including the execution of the popular CoreMark benchmark from flash memory. In its deepest sleep modes, NXP promises sub-microamp draw with a total of seven sleep modes to choose from and a dual power domain — a first for NXP — while the two microcontroller cores of the L25x can be run independently for always-on sensing as low as 14µA at 2MHz with 100kb/s I2C transaction ongoing.
NXP is showcasing the new microcontrollers at CES in Las Vegas this week, and aims to begin sampling in the first half of the year with general availability in the second half; pricing has yet to be announced. More information is available on the NXP website.