AI at the Edge Takes Center Stage with New NXP MCU Family
September 25, 2024
News
AI-enabled edge computing is in a massive growth cycle, both among consumer-facing markets, and in the B-to-B, enterprise, and industrial verticals. This growth in demand is driving an ever-increasing demand for additional compute power and new functions, while still remaining low power enough to run on batteries.
NXP Semiconductors in a new release has announced the i.MX RT700 crossover MCU family, which is designed to meet this need and power smart AI-enabled edge devices like wearables, consumer medical devices, smart home devices and HMI platforms.
“As pioneers of the crossover MCU, we’re not just advancing products with the i.MX RT700, we’re redefining what’s possible at the edge,” said Charles Dachs, SVP and GM, Industrial and IoT, NXP. “The i.MX RT700 provides significant enhancements in power consumption and efficiency, enabling breakthroughs that extend battery life and ensure reliability in resource-constrained applications. Additionally, the integration of our eIQ Neutron NPU enables customers to build innovative machine learning applications, improving AI and multi-tasking capabilities of low-power edge devices.”
The i.MX features as many as five powerful cores in a single device, according to the announcement, and it is the first use of the eIQ Neutron NPU in a crossover MCU, NXP says. The NPU is designed to accelerate AI workloads by up to 172x and reduce energy per inference by up to 119x. The i.MX RT700 crossover MCUs also integrate up to 7.5MB ultra-low power SRAM and offer a 30-70 percent reduction in power consumption compared to previous generations, the company said.
The i.MX RT700 crossover MCU is made with a low-power, multicore design that reportedly incorporates powerful graphics capabilities, AI hardware acceleration, advanced security and a sense compute subsystem. This this suite enables the creatin of solutions with multimodal capabilities like presence sensing, gesture recognition, voice control, and more, all on a single unified platform, NXP said.
The i.MX RT700 family includes among its 5 cores a primary Arm Cortex-M33 running at 325 MHz, with an integrated Cadence Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP for more demanding DSP and audio processing tasks. It also uses NXP’s eIQ Neutron NPU, enabled with the eIQ machine learning software development environment. The family scales up to 7.5MB of ultra-low power SRAM with zero wait-state access and is built with an ultra-low power sense compute subsystem with a second Cortex-M33 and integrated Cadence Tensilica HiFi 1 DSP.
To optimize power consumption, the family uses a series of power architecture strategies, including advanced adaptive deep sleep techniques, optimized clock architectures with low-power cache schemes, and advanced wake/sleep cycles, according to the release, which can deliver a 30-70 percent improvement over previous generations.
The i.MX RT700 crossover MCU family is currently sampling for qualified early-access customers. For more information, visit nxp.com/RT700.
Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with two decades of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers, he would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars. In previous lives, he’s been a short order cook, telemarketer, medical supply technician, mover of the bodies at a funeral home, pirate, poet, partial alliterist, parent, partner and pretender to various thrones. Most of his exploits are either exaggerated or blatantly false.
