NXP Semiconductors recently launched its family of ultra-low-power MCX L series of microcontrollers (MCUs) – the MCX L14x and MCX L25x – which IoT Insider learned more about in an exclusive briefing, more specifically the microcontrollers’ key features and the market need. Raphael Apfeldorfer, Senior Product Marketing Manager for the MCX product portfolio shared more in the briefing.
Setting the scene
Setting the scene, demand for low-power solutions – and ultra-low-power solutions, by extension – has continued to grow, placing pressure on chip vendors like NXP to design MCUs that are capable of reducing power consumption while offering the same, if not better, capabilities.
“We’re seeing a lot of design engineers facing more challenges when they design for Edge applications,” explained Apfeldorfer, “but also AI embedded acceleration, enhanced security, poor efficiency and more.”
To be cognisant of these challenges, NXP offers a variety of different MCX MCU series that have different feature sets and use cases. The fifth series, the MCX L series which was announced this month, focuses on power consumption and always-on battery-powered applications.
Apfeldorfer listed the trends he and NXP more broadly were witnessing in the IoT battery board space that drove NXP to introduce such a solution: the rise of digitalisation spurring the creation of more sensor data; these sensor devices becoming battery-operated to minimise the cost of installation, avoid reliance on a connected power supply, and to shrink the battery size, so sensors can be placed in hard to reach locations; always-on monitoring for continuous data collection; and compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act.
“MCUs need to have a smaller battery size to minimise size and cost, and the device lifetime in the field needs to be optimised,” he concluded. “This needs continuous work on improving the power consumption of the device to extend battery life and minimise cost. There’s also a need for device robustness in industrial environments.”
Upon being asked whether achieving low power consumption and high performance was a balancing act, Apfeldorfer said: “It’s always a trade off between bringing down power consumption and driving high performance and available functionalities .”
A commitment to ultra-low-power
The new microcontroller series reflects NXP’s commitment to providing ultra-low-power solutions for industrial and home energy management applications. More specifically, these applications encompass meters, smart sensors and residential applications that are battery-constrained, such as a temperature sensor.
“On the flow meter [side], there is a wave of updates coming to Europe due to the European gas and water meter regulation that is mandating we use certified sensors for accuracy and reliability of metering,” Apfeldorfer explained. As a result, the expectation is for the market to favour retrofitting existing devices with connected sensors – thereby increasing the need for battery-powered sensors that have low power consumption.
Enter NXP’s MCX L series. “We have the MCX L14 that brings key features for these industrial and commercial sensors, mostly focusing on low-power ADC sensing and analogue sensing,” Apfeldorfer added.
NXP achieved ultra-low-power performance in its MCX L series through a dual-core architecture. The dual-core architecture comprises the ULP sense domain that is responsible for performing continuous sensing for battery-powered applications, and the real-time domain, which occasionally turns on, when needed, and is required for operations like archiving data or sending it to an external system. It can also be used for more compute-intensive tasks.
Seemingly incremental changes like bringing down the core voltage from 0.9 volts to 0.65 volts, subsequently reduces power consumption by 50%. “That’s a pretty radical improvement,” emphasised Apfeldorfer.
“To lower power consumption, [our] engineers have used all of the learnings from previous generations of low-power MCUs, but also developed innovative algorithms to optimise power consumption,” he added.
The algorithm in question is NXP’s adaptive dynamic voltage control (ADVC) technology. “That’s one of the key ingredients that allows us to run three times less power than existing MCX devices when you have a continuous data monitoring operation.”
The ADVC technology senses what’s going on in the chip and can adjust the core voltage accordingly. “When your chips are getting older, most of the time they are susceptible to small variations after some time in the field,” he explained. “We have sensing inside of the chip that allows us to measure how old and how quickly they react, so we can bring the voltage down at the right level.”
When summarising the new MCU series, which was showcased at CES, an event that recently came to a close on 10th January, Apfeldorfer said: “With this ultra-low-power domain, we have significantly extended the battery life for flow meters and battery-constrained applications.”
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