NXP Targets the Software-Defined Vehicle with Its S32K5 Chips — Packing MRAM for 15-Fold Write Gains
The product of a partnership with TSMC, these new 16nm FinFET microcontrollers come with everything you need for future automotive systems.
NXP Semiconductors has announced a new microcontroller family, the S32K5, which it claims is the world's first to be built on a 16nm FinFET process and to include magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) — and it's hoping the part will find a home in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) of the future.
"The new S32K5 family pushes the boundaries of MCU [Microcontroller Unit] performance without sacrificing the safety, efficiency, and isolation that are essential for zonal solutions," NXP's Manuel Alves claims. "The NXP CoreRide platform featuring S32K5 will help automakers and Tier-1s accelerate the development of zonal architectures, providing a scalable foundation for software-driven innovation."
The S32K5 microcontroller range is the product of a partnership between NXP and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), announced back in May 2023, to developer magnetoresistive memory (MRAM) IP for production on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process node — delivering improved performance over existing flash memory technology, the companies claim, with NXP measuring the write speed of its S32K5's MRAM as 15 times higher than equivalent flash parts.
The S32K5 family is based around Arm Cortex-M7 primary cores running at up to 800MHz, plus Arm Cortex-R52 cores in a "compute extension" block and Cortex-M4 cores in a "low-power engine" block, and features a range of accelerators designed for improving the performance of key automotive workloads including network translation, security, and digital signal processing. Naturally, there's also a neural processing unit (NPU), the eIQ Neutron, to boost the performance of on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads.
The S32K5 family forms part of NXP's CoreRide platform, which takes NXP's S32-series parts and combines them with qualified middleware, operating systems, and other software from partners including Accenture ESR Labs, ArcherMind, Blackberry QNX, Elektrobit, ETAS, Green Hills Software, Sonatus, Synopsys, TTTech Auto, Vector Informatik GmbH, and Wind River — all, the company says, designed to make it easier to bring automotive designs to market.
The new chips are to begin sampling to "lead customers" in the third quarter of this year, NXP has confirmed; pricing and full specifications have yet to be announced. More information is available on the company's website.
