NXP Semiconductors has announced its newest microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex-M4 processor. NXP is one of the first ARM partners to license the Cortex-M4 processor, a highly efficient solution for digital signal control applications, and is reportedly the first to demonstrate working silicon.
NXP’s Cortex-M4 DSC family is implemented using an ultra low-leakage 90 nm process technology. This enables performance in excess of 150 MHz, as well as very low active power consumption. In addition, the MCUs offer extremely low power-down currents using techniques proprietary to NXP. Featuring the high-efficiency signal processing functionality of the Cortex-M4, the NXP microcontrollers are designed for a broad range of applications, including sophisticated motor control, digital power control and embedded audio.
Traditional microcontrollers are designed to perform control oriented applications but are not well suited for sophisticated digital signal processing algorithms. Adding a separate DSP can make the overall system extremely complex and costly. However, with the optimised high-performance DSP extensions on the Cortex-M4, this new class of DSC is designed to solve both control and signal processing seamlessly.
The ARM Cortex-M4 processor has an extensive set of single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions; optimised single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instructions; saturated arithmetic instructions; as well as a single precision floating point unit (FPU). Coupled with high processing speeds, these MCUs are well suited for processing analog data and complex processing algorithms.
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