Dutch electronics giant NXP is using software containers with standard APIs to bring smartphone-like software design flexibility to the industrial and IoT edge.

Co-developed with French software company MicroEJ, the NXP platform accelerator should enable a significant reduction in customer development costs and improve time to market.

The accelerator combines MicroEJ’s Vee software containers with standard APIs. Vee enables software portability across NXP’s portfolio of RTOS-based MCUs and Linux-based applications processors, letting manufacturers accelerate product development and reduce costs. Furthermore, the accelerator provides dedicated APIs to create easy access to functionalities integrated in NXP’s processors, such as power management and 3D and 2D graphics.

Smart devices across industrial and IoT markets are difficult to develop and deploy. Many are designed for a single purpose, with fixed functionality and limited computing capability that may be insufficient to support the evolving needs of an increasingly automated environment. Scaling product capability requires redeveloping and integrating low-level software, RTOS or higher-level OS, and middleware, which can create major development problems and significantly slow product development.

The platform accelerator solves this problem by using software containerisation that enables binary software portability across NXP’s processors, from MCUs to applications processors. Reusability at the binary level enables users to prototype products quickly and create a portfolio of complex smart devices that evolve with market needs and trends. Furthermore, the accelerator enables sandboxed application deployment at the edge, bringing smartphone-like capability to the edge, such as partial or complete over-the-air updates, downloadable apps, and microservices.

“Just like what happened in the smartphone industry, containerisation can be a tremendous tool to drive the rapid development of new smart device platforms,” said Charles Dachs, senior vice president at NXP. “By integrating MicroEJ’s software container with NXP’s broad portfolio of edge processing, we equip engineers to bring more products to market faster, with reduced costs, and to support the continuous evolution of their smart devices across industrial and IoT markets.” 

Fred Rivard, CEO of MicroEJ, added: “Software portability and BoM optimisation are often mutually exclusive. The NXP platform accelerator combines these two objectives, thanks to tiny software containers. This small-footprint innovation allows developers to benefit from both an optimised bill of materials and a modern software design process. This enables engineers to create new products and platforms more quickly, design products that are lower power and lower cost, while still allowing for feature-rich differentiation and innovation by device manufacturers.”

The accelerator integrates development tools, including simulation, virtual device management and a multi-language framework for combination of C, Java and JavaScript languages, as well as agile collaboration processes and support for Android Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse IDEs. In addition, it integrates dedicated APIs for power management and graphic functions, making it easier to use the complex hardware IP brought by NXP. For example, a simple call to ‘low power profile’ from the user application layer will trigger performance optimisation for a given power profile. In addition, NXP-tailored containers support broad scalability and integrate NXP-specific optimisations and libraries that leverage processor hardware.

The accelerator is available for NXP’s processors, including i.MX RT595 and high-performance multi-core i.MX RT1170 crossover MCUs.

Built on more than 60 years of combined experience and expertise, NXP (www.nxp.com) has approximately 34,500 employees in more than 30 countries and posted revenue of $13.2bn in 2022.

MicroEJ (www.microej.com) is a French-American independent software vendor with headquarters in Nantes, France, and offices in Boston, Massachusetts.