NXP Semiconductors N.V. has unveiled its new S32K5 family of automotive microcontrollers (MCU), the automotive industry’s first 16nm FinFET MCU with embedded magnetic RAM (MRAM). The S32K5 MCU family will extend the NXP CoreRide platform with pre-integrated zonal and electrification system solutions for scalable software-defined vehicle (SDV) architectures.
NXP’s new S32K5 family features Arm® Cortex® CPU cores running up to 800 MHz and offers power-efficient application performance, enabled by the 16nm FinFET process. Optimized accelerators are available to boost key workloads, including network translation, security and digital signal processing. The integrated Ethernet switch core, common with NXP’s S32N family of automotive processors, brings a proven networking solution that streamlines network design and enables software re-use.
With its integrated software-defined, hardware-enforced isolation architecture, the S32K5 enables automakers to implement safe and secure partitioning. It ensures safety applications up to ASIL-D can be integrated without compromising safety or performance.
The S32K5 also features a dedicated eIQ® Neutron neural processing unit (NPU), NXP’s scalable machine learning accelerator, enabling machine learning algorithms to perform power-efficient, real-time processing of sensor data at the vehicle’s edge.
Additionally, on-chip high-performance MRAM accelerates ECU programming times both in the factory and for OTA updates, with more than 15x faster write speeds than embedded Flash memory technologies. Combined with NXP’s latest security accelerator including post-quantum cryptography (PQC) capability, the S32K5 enables automakers to safely and securely deploy new features throughout the vehicle lifetime, benefiting the manufacturing and ownership of the vehicle.
The S32K5 will begin sampling with lead customers in Q3 2025.
