These days, hardworking industrial equipment is getting small enough to wear
or fly. The vast market for mobile industrial solutions ranges from patient
monitors, mobile service robots, drones, emergency responder equipment and
radios, to highly-secured point-of-sale devices. Some ruggedized platforms can
fit into a pocket and many are used for mission-critical scenarios. Their
operators demand intuitive interfaces, true real-time response and extreme
reliability.
Even the industrial solutions found in traditional factory, building,
warehouse and infrastructure applications are rapidly evolving to provide
sleek, user-friendly graphical touch screens and hands-free voice control,
secure cloud access, along with safe and reliable real-time response. These
new features place significant demands on processing performance, battery
life, security capabilities and the multimedia experience.
Powerful Integration
At Embedded World this week, NXP announced the i.MX 8X family of applications processors,
specifically designed to meet these combined industrial design challenges.
The new i.MX 8X family is our third in the i.MX 8 series, designed to meet the
safety-certifiable and efficient performance requirements of industrial,
automotive and consumer applications.
The new i.MX 8X family includes all-purpose applications processors, which
combine ARM® Cortex®-A35 and Cortex-M4 cores
to function as both a connected multimedia device and a real-time industrial
controller. Processors in this family have a high level of integration, with
hardware accelerated graphics and video, multiple camera and display
interfaces, a high performance DSP and more.
NXP’s continued goal for the i.MX applications processor line is to
simplify development, reduce maintenance effort and cost and contribute
scalable solutions for as much software and hardware design reuse as possible.
Cool Performance
Mobile industrial solutions particularly benefit from using this new chip. We
selected cores that are cool to the touch, tuned the architecture for extended
battery life, boosted performance and revved up the real-time response for
devices that are light enough to fly.
The i.MX 8X is built with two of the most power-efficient Arm Cortex core
types available. Power savings are further enhanced by this fourth-generation
asymmetrical architecture, which can shut off the Cortex-A35 cores and unused
resources while the Cortex-M4 performs low-level system monitoring and
connectivity.
The 28nm fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) fabrication process
brings additional power efficiency, to help the i.MX 8X run fanless in a hot
environment without air flow. These power-saving capabilities make the NXP
i.MX 8X the perfect processor for energy efficient and battery operated
industrial applications.
New Safety and Reliability Capabilities
Safety and reliability are paramount for both mobile and stationary industrial
applications. With this in mind, the i.MX 8X is NXP’s first i.MX
applications processor to add Error Correcting Code (ECC) on the DDR3
interface. This hardware feature detects and corrects memory bit corruption to
keep everything running smoothly and reliably. Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL
3) certification is much easier as a result, for applications such as
programmable logic controllers, input/output controllers, autonomous robots
and drones.
I think it’s fair to say that this new i.MX 8X solution has reached new
heights with its optimized performance, efficient integration, enhanced
reliability and impressive low power consumption. Be it a scanner that
converses, a worker’s vest that records and alerts, or a drone that
safely inspects tall structures, we expect to see our new i.MX 8X in the heart
of many wide-ranging, innovative and productive industrial applications.
