NXP Introduces New MCX family of Microcontrollers, But Do They Support I3C?

Earlier this month, NXP announced their new MCX portfolio of general purpose ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. This portfolio of devices is targeted towards industrial and IoT edge computing applications and is the first to feature NXP’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for machine learning and AI.

This portfolio is split into 4 series: (N) Advanced, (A) Essential, (W) Wireless, and (L) Ultra Low Power. A high-level breakdown of each series was published in their fact sheet, seen below. 

While the announcement is quite exciting, the specific details are still a bit sparse. Thankfully I was able to spend a few moments at the NXP booth at Embedded World 2022 to get some questions answered. It will come as no surprise that the two biggest questions I had were as follows:

#1) Will the MCX devices feature an I3C peripheral?
#2) When will more information / chips be available publicly?

The answer to question #1 was very positive: Yes! It is confirmed that at least some, if not all, variants of the MCX device portfolio will include I3C support. However, the answer for #2 is that availability will be in the 2nd half of 2023, with more information being made public around the same time. That gives us pretty much a full year of waiting in great anticipation.

Update on 5 November 2022:

NXP announced the details of the MCX N Series microcontrollers, consisting of the N94x and N54x families, both featuring 2 x I3C peripherals among the vast array of hardware peripherals. The block diagram below shows the hardware of the MCX N94x device for reference:

Additional details can be found on the product page on NXP’s website here.

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