Taiwanese electronics firm Nuvoton Technology has launched a heterogeneous multi-core microprocessor series for high performance real time control applications. The NuMicro MA35D1 series is designed for industrial IoT edge applications, smart factories and Tiny AI/ML.

The new series processes data at edge in real time and provides advanced security mechanisms to prevent malicious software attacks, confidential data theft, or tampering with confidential data.

It integrates high-speed transmission interfaces and supports multiple communication protocols to improve performance when communicating and collecting data with different devices.

The MA35D1 series employs dual-core 64-bit Arm® Cortex®-A35 cores, with a maximum clock speed of 800 MHz, providing Tiny AI/ML edge computing capabilities, and is equipped with a 180 MHz Arm Cortex-M4 core for real-time control. The series supports secure booting from USB, SD/eMMC, NAND, and SPI Flash (SPI NOR/SPI NAND) modes. To simplify system design, support production, and reduce development costs, it is available in LQFP and BGA packages and can operate within an industrial-grade temperature range of -40°C to 105°C (Tj). It also stacks DDR3L SDRAM with a maximum capacity of 512 MB, significantly reducing PCB layers, area, and electromagnetic interference.

The series has advanced security mechanisms, including a Trusted Secure Island (TSI) – an independent security hardware unit developed by Nuvoton, Arm TrustZone® technology, Secure Boot, tamper detection, built-in AES, SHA, ECC, RSA, and SM2/3/4 encryption and decryption accelerators, and a true random number generator (TRNG), as well as key storage and one-time programmable (OTP) memory. All security-related operations are executed in the TSI to protect sensitive and high-value data. These security features can also satisfy requirements for IEC 62443 certification.

The series provides high-frequency, low-latency, and high-volume data transmission for industrial IoT edge devices with high-speed communication interfaces, including two sets of Gigabit Ethernet, two sets of SDIO, two sets of high-speed USB 2.0, four sets of CAN FD, seventeen sets of UART, as well as various communication, analogue, and digital input/output peripheral interfaces. These peripheral interfaces can be allocated for the real-time processing core Cortex-M4 to achieve real-time data acquisition and control.

The NuMicro MA35D1 platform provides Linux, RTOS, and OpenWrt operating systems and software and hardware development tools. For HMI graphic libraries, the NuMicro® MA35D1 supports emWin, LVGL, and Qt, letting users easily create smooth and beautiful graphical user interfaces (GUIs).