NXP ultra-low-power MCUs debut at CES 2025

These new products, which were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, form part of its ongoing initiative to provide innovative systems solutions for industrial and home energy management.

The MCX L series features a dual-core architecture with an independent ultra-low-power sense domain to enable challenging battery-limited applications, such as sensors for industrial monitoring, building management, and flow metering.

This ultra-low-power sense domain is equipped with a comprehensive suite of peripherals that remain fully operational even when the real-time processor is in sleep mode, allowing for independent functionality and ensuring continuous data collection and processing. This helps to maximize battery life and optimize battery size, allowing for highly efficient always-on sensing.

Battery-powered sensors are the cornerstone of intelligent industrial and IoT environments, providing real-time insights that drive operational efficiency. The MCX L series’ ultra-low-power design addresses fundamental challenges in sensor technology by enabling more energy efficient data collection and reporting. This helps to maximize battery life, optimize battery size or even allow mains-powered devices to become battery-powered. This further accelerates the deployment and operation of more sophisticated sensor networks that improve the overall efficiency of industrial processes.

“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,” said Charles Dachs, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Industrial and IoT, NXP. “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 features an Arm Cortex-M33 core,with the MCX L14x running up to 48 MHz and the MCX L25x running up to 96 MHz. The MCX L25x also features a Cortex-M0+ core, operating as an ultra-low-power always-on sense domain. The MCX L series features from 64 kB to 512 kB flash, with 8 kB to 128 kB of SRAM.

These devices are NXP’s first MCUs with a dual-power domain able to operate at extremely low power for both edge data acquisition and edge computing.

The MCX L25x offers power consumption as low as 24 µA/MHz on representative workloads, such as CoreMark execution from flash memory, with dual operation in real-time at 48 MHz and low-power compute at 10 MHz. It also features seven low-power modes, enabling power consumption down to sub-µA in the deepest sleep modes.

The MCX L25x series can be easily coupled with connectivity solutions, such as NXP’s UBX100 sub-GHz transceiver, for cloud data processing solutions, such as fault detection, presence detection, intrusion detection, operation analysis and more. The on-device low-power real-time domain allows data transmission through low-power WAN connectivity interfaces, such as sub-GHz radio, LoRa or Sigfox for battery-powered wireless monitoring devices. A rich set of peripherals supports sensor interfacing, including the CE Metrology certification required for smart metering in Europe. The low-power domain allows metrology to run independently from the real-time domain, simplifying the deployment of CE Metrology certified software.

NXP EdgeLock security capabilities, include support for secure manufacturing, fast and secure boot, secure debug access and configuration. The MCX L25x series, designed to support connected applications, also includes pre-provisioned device unique identity, public key cryptography acceleration to further improve power consumption and performance, as well as Arm TrustZone® technology for the isolation of sensitive code such as cryptographic stacks or metrology software.

The MCX L series, as well as the larger MCX portfolio, is supported by NXP’s FRDM development boards - a low-cost, scalable hardware platform supported by the unified MCUXpresso Developer Experience, to provide a consistent, open-source friendly environment across MCX devices.

These compact boards enable flexible and rapid prototyping, with industry-standard headers providing easy access to the MCU’s I/Os. With the on-board MCU-Link debug probe and USB-C cable included, engineers can develop, debug and program with ease.

Common with the broader MCX portfolio, the FRDM boards are supported by the widely adopted MCUXpresso ecosystem, including the MCUXpresso SDK, which provides production-grade drivers and middleware available in a single, convenient package or via GitHub. Developers can choose to work with either MCUXpresso for Visual Studio Code or Eclipse-based MCUXpresso IDE from NXP, or with IDEs from IAR and Keil that also offer safety certification.

Additional software and tools, such as those for device configuration, security and specialist applications, are complemented by a range of compatible middleware and tools from NXP’s partner ecosystem.

FRDM-compatible expansion boards from NXP and its partners are available at the Expansion Board Hub.

NXP’s Application Code Hub provides access to a constantly growing and evolving range of GitHub-based software examples that can be easily searched and filtered either from a web browser or from within NXP IDEs. These examples range from simple, handy code snippets, through proof-of-concept demos, to full reference software packages.

The MCX L series is expected to begin sampling in 1H 2025, with general availability expected in 2H 2025.