February 7, 2024 /SemiMedia/ -- NXP Semiconductors recently announced the MCX A14x and MCX A15x, the first products in the general A-series of MCX family of MCU products. Designed to allow engineers to do more, the new MCX A series is a low cost, easy to use, small-footprint MCU optimized with the essential features, innovative power architecture and software compatibility required by many embedded applications, including industrial sensors, motor control, battery or handheld power system controllers, IoT devices and more.

The MCX portfolio, including the MCX A series, is supported by the MCUXpresso Developer Experience, with newest iteration of the FRDM development platform. The enhanced FRDM boards accelerate prototyping, as well as rapid porting and bring up of custom hardware. Consistent tool suites across IDE choices, plus support for FreeRTOS and Zephyr, ensure scalability and portability across both MCX A and other NXP MCU platforms. This makes it easier to quickly create new products or target new use cases on a common development platform with a consistent user experience.

“The MCX A series is an important milestone on our ongoing journey to make the newest innovations accessible to every engineer, allowing them to do more with MCX. The MCX portfolio serves as the foundation for the future of power-efficient edge devices, expediting the deployment of disruptive technology across the industrial and IoT markets. The MCX A devices build on that foundation, distilling integration into essential features, encouraging engineers to design without bounds.”

Charles Dachs, Senior Vice President and General Manager, IoT and Industrial, NXP

The MCX A series features an Arm® Cortex®-M33 core, with the MCX A14x running up to 48 MHz and the MCX A15x running up to 96 MHz. The devices also feature support for low-power peripheral sets, BLDC/PMSM motor control and integrated sensor interfaces (MIPI-I3C, I2C, SPI). The MCX A series will offer a wide variety of package and memory variants up to 1MB flash, as the platform extends throughout 2024.

Each MCX A device includes a selection of smart peripherals able to act autonomously, independent of the CPU, allowing the CPU to run at a lower frequency and reduce power consumption. The intelligent peripherals include serial comms with built-in buffers, programmable data collection range and DMA; mixed signals ADC; DAC; operational amp with built-in intelligence for averaging and peak detection; and FlexPWM with dead time control and encoder for motor applications. The innovative power architecture is designed to support high utilization of I/Os and power efficiency with a simple supply circuit in a smaller footprint. Designed to support more GPIO pins for additional external connections, the MCX A allows designers to utilize a smaller package, simpler board design and lower system BOM costs.

The MCX A14x and A15x families are now available. For more information, please visit nxp.com/MCXA.