Date: 17/11/2009

ARM Cortex based MCU at a price of less than $1 from NXP Semiconductor

NXP has made available an MCU chip based on ARM Cortex-M0 coded LPC1100 at a price of less than 65 Cents from its distributors. NXP's LPC1100 family consists of 15 numbers is targeted for customers who would prefer to shift from 8/16-bit to 32 bit embedded design.

"Existing 8-bit architectures have their origins in the early era of the semiconductor industry, resulting in limitations of address range, register restrictions, limited functionality, unsuitability for high-level languages, and little attention to power and scaling issues," said Geoff Lees, vice president and general manager, microcontroller product line, NXP Semiconductors. "The Cortex-M0 processor core and system architecture take full advantage of today's optimized low-power design tools, techniques, and the latest low-power, high-density silicon Flash process."

With a processing power of 45 DMIPS, LPC1100 can execute more comflex embedded software compared to 8 bit and 16 bit MCUs. These devices work at clock speeds of 50 MHz with current consumption of less than 10 mA.

Since NXP says LPC1100 requires 40-50 percent small source-code for most common microcontroller tasks, this family of MCUs also takes less memory footprint for source code part of your embedded software in comparison to 8/16 bit MCUs

"It may be a big surprise to embedded users how much the LPC1100, a 32-bit microcontroller, outperforms in efficiency compared to 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers. If performance and energy consumption are important criteria for selecting a microcontroller, based on the results generated from EEMBC's CoreMark benchmark, embedded designers should check out the LPC1100 (especially with its $0.65 price tag) before committing to any 8- or 16-bit options with comparable features and pricing. The scores for the LPC1100 are already posted on CoreMark.org," said Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

Features of the NXP LPC1100 family of microcontrollers include,

50 MHz Cortex-M0 processor with SWD/debug (4 break-points)
32 Vectored Interrupts, 4 priority levels, dedicated Interrupts on up to 13 GPIOs
UART, 1 or 2 SPI, I2C (FM+), 2 16-bit and 2 32-bit timers with PWM/Match/Capture
12MHz Internal RC Oscillator with 1% accuracy over temperature and voltage
Power-On-Reset (POR), Multi-level Brown-Out-Detect (BOD), 10-50 MHz Phase-Locked Loop (PLL)
8-channel high precision 10-bit ADC with ±1LSB DNL
Up to 28 or 42 fast 5V tolerant GPIO pins for HVQFN33 and LQFP48 respectively, high drive (20 mA) on select pins
Single 1.8 - 3.6V power supply, over 5kV ESD for rugged applications

Future product features will include Ultra Low Power options, CAN, 12-bit ADC and DAC, temperature sensor, high-resolution timer features, and advanced sensor interface.

Development tools from IAR, Keil, Hitex, Code Red, and many others support the LPC1100 family. NXP will also offer an easy to use, comprehensive development tool platform for under US$30.

Price of different members of the family: Recommended distribution unit pricing in 10,000 piece quantities for the 33-pin package is: LPC1111FHN33/101 at US$0.65, LPC1112FHN33/101 at $0.75, LPC1113FHN33/201 at $0.85, and LPC1114FHN33/201 at $0.95, with Flash sizes of 8K, 16K, 24K and 32K respectively. In addition, 48-pin LPQFP and PLCC44 packages will be available for socketed applications.

For more details visit www.standardics.nxp.com/microcontrollers/