NXP’'s 120 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 MCUs top DSP benchmarks

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS: NXP Semiconductors has announced the availability of the LPC1769 and LPC1759 microcontrollers that operate at 120 MHz, the fastest ARM Cortex-M3 MCUs in the industry.

At this level of performance, integration of microcontroller control and signal processing becomes a reality for cost constrained applications eliminating the need for dedicated DSP hardware.

With 256-point 16-bit FFT execution time of less than 190 µs, this is 54 percent faster than the nearest Cortex-M3 alternative and challenges low-cost DSPs in performance. For 1024-point 16-bit FFT the execution time is less than 0.89 ms. These times include the FFT initialization and overhead of the algorithm.

“With the availability of the LPC1769 and LPC1759, NXP’s performance advantage increases up to 40 percent over other Cortex-M3 MCUs,” said Geoff Lees, vice president and general manager, microcontroller product line, NXP Semiconductors. “We’ve simplified high performance embedded control for our users with the most extensive DSP library available.”

The LPC1769 and LPC1759 MCUs feature 512 KB Flash, 64 KB SRAM, USB 2.0 Host/On-The-Go/Device, CAN 2.0B interfaces, 12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC, I2C, SPI, UARTs and many other peripherals. The LPC1769 also adds a 10/100 Ethernet controller with a dedicated Ethernet Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller.