What’s new: NXP Semiconductors today announced its new i.MX RT700 crossover MCU family, designed to power smart AI-enabled edge devices, such as wearables, consumer medical devices, smart home devices and HMI platforms. The i.MX RT700 family delivers an optimized combination of high performance, extensive integration, advanced functionality, and power efficiency for the new era of edge AI computing.
Featuring up to five powerful cores in a single device, the i.MX RT700 includes the first instantiation of the eIQ® Neutron NPU in a crossover MCU, accelerating AI workloads by up to 172x, while simultaneously reducing 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% reduction in power consumption compared to previous generations.
Why it matters: AI-enabled edge computing devices have created an ever-increasing demand for additional compute power and new functionalities. At the same time, many of these devices are battery-powered, creating a need for MCUs with much lower power consumption.
The i.MX RT700 crossover MCU delivers on this need with a low-power, multicore design that incorporates powerful graphics capabilities, AI hardware acceleration, advanced security and a sense compute subsystem. This empowers companies to create a full family of solutions with multimodal capabilities like presence sensing, gesture recognition, voice control, and more, all on a single unified platform.
“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, Senior Vice President and General Manager, 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.”
More details: The i.MX RT700 crossover MCU family features up to five computing cores. This includes 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 features NXP’s eIQ Neutron NPU, enabled with the eIQ machine learning software development environment. The family scales up to a best-in-class 7.5MB of ultra-low power SRAM with zero wait-state access. The i.MX RT700 also includes an ultra-low power sense compute subsystem with a second Cortex-M33 and integrated Cadence Tensilica HiFi 1 DSP. This removes the need for an external sensor hub, reducing system design complexity, footprint and BOM costs.
Accelerating AI with eIQ Neutron
To unlock the potential of AI on constrained devices like MCUs, the eIQ Neutron NPU efficiently accelerates AI inference by offloading the workload from the Cortex-M33. This allows the eIQ Neutron NPU to accomplish tasks more quickly, such as up to 18x faster anomaly detection or up to 172x faster image classification, depending on the model, compared to running these tasks on the Cortex-M33 alone. With 7.5MB of onboard SRAM, i.MX RT700 can execute more complex multi-modal AI tasks that would be challenging for traditional microcontrollers.
Low Power for Ultra-long Battery Life
Power consumption is a critical consideration for edge devices. The i.MX RT700 family is designed to optimize power consumption, delivering a 30-70% improvement compared to previous generations. This is accomplished through a series of power architecture innovations, such as advanced adaptive deep sleep techniques, optimized clock architectures with low-power cache schemes, advanced wake/sleep cycle and more. As a result, end devices can either extend their battery life or can use smaller batteries, allowing more design flexibility.
Highly Integrated MCU to Optimize Coding
Additionally, the i.MX RT700 family enhances system performance and flexibility with an integrated, high-efficiency DC-DC converter, basic memory management unit and supports improved analog peripherals. It also is NXP’s first crossover MCU to support the emerging eUSB standard, enabling USB 2.0 interfaces to operate at I/O voltages of 1 V or 1.2 V instead of 3.3 V.
Security at the Core of Edge Devices
Cybersecurity and privacy for smart connected consumer devices are now more important than ever, especially with upcoming cybersecurity regulations such as the U.S. Trust Mark and the European Cyber Resilient Act. The i.MX RT700 family offers an accelerated compliance path to these regulations and other security standards for consumer devices, including ETSI 303 645.
Cyber resilience and protection of consumer’s data are at the core of the i.MX RT700 family. The new crossover MCU integrates an EdgeLock Secure Enclave (Core Profile), providing smart devices with advanced security functions, including secure boot with battery saving mode, secure update, seamless memory encryption and secure access to data. It also features strong device authentication with built-in physically unclonable function (PuF).
Product Availability
The i.MX RT700 crossover MCU family is currently sampling for qualified early-access customers. For more information, please visit nxp.com/RT700.
About NXP Semiconductors
NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) is the trusted partner for innovative solutions in the automotive, industrial & IoT, mobile, and communications infrastructure markets. NXP’s “Brighter Together” approach combines leading-edge technology with pioneering people to develop system solutions that make the connected world better, safer, and more secure. The company has operations in more than 30 countries and posted revenue of $13.28 billion in 2023. Find out more at www.nxp.com.
