MCUXpresso SDK Release Notes

Overview

The MCUXpresso SDK is a comprehensive software enablement package designed to simplify and accelerate application development with Arm Cortex-M-based devices from NXP, including its general purpose, crossover and Bluetooth-enabled MCUs. MCUXpresso SW and Tools for DSC further extends the SDK support to current 32-bit Digital Signal Controllers. The MCUXpresso SDK includes production-grade software with integrated RTOS (optional), integrated enabling software technologies (stacks and middleware), reference software, and more.

In addition to working seamlessly with the MCUXpresso IDE, the MCUXpresso SDK also supports and provides example projects for various toolchains. The Development tools chapter in the associated Release Notes provides details about toolchain support for your board. Support for the MCUXpresso Config Tools allows easy cloning of existing SDK examples and demos, allowing users to leverage the existing software examples provided by the SDK for their own projects.

Underscoring our commitment to high quality, the MCUXpresso SDK is MISRA compliant and checked with Coverity static analysis tools. For details on MCUXpresso SDK, see MCUXpresso-SDK: Software Development Kit for MCUXpresso.

MCUXpresso SDK

As part of the MCUXpresso software and tools, MCUXpresso SDK is the evolution of Kinetis SDK, includes support for LPC, DSC,PN76, and i.MX System-on-Chip (SoC). The same drivers, APIs, and middleware are still available with support for Kinetis, LPC, DSC, and i.MX silicon. The MCUXpresso SDK adds support for the MCUXpresso IDE, an Eclipse-based toolchain that works with all MCUXpresso SDKs. Easily import your SDK into the new toolchain to access to all of the available components, examples, and demos for your target silicon. In addition to the MCUXpresso IDE, support for the MCUXpresso Config Tools allows easy cloning of existing SDK examples and demos, allowing users to leverage the existing software examples provided by the SDK for their own projects.

In order to maintain compatibility with legacy Freescale code, the filenames and source code in MCUXpresso SDK containing the legacy Freescale prefix FSL has been left as is. The FSL prefix has been redefined as the NXP Foundation Software Library.

Development tools

The MCUXpresso SDK is compiled and tested with these development tools:

MCUXpresso IDE, Rev. 24.12

IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm, version is 9.60.3

Keil MDK, version is 5.41

MCUXpresso for VS Code v24.12
GCC Arm Embedded Toolchain 13.2.1

Xtensa Xplorer, version is 10.1.11
Xtensa C Compiler, version is RI-2023.11

Supported development systems

This release supports board and devices listed in following table. The board and devices in bold were tested in this release.

Development boards	MCU devices
EVK-MIMXRT595	MIMXRT533SFAWC, MIMXRT533SFFOC, MIMXRT555SFAWC, MIMXRT555SFFOC, MIMXRT595SFAWC, MIMXRT595SFFOC

MCUXpresso SDK release package

The MCUXpresso SDK release package content is aligned with the silicon subfamily it supports. This includes the boards, CMSIS, devices, middleware, and RTOS support.

Device support

The device folder contains the whole software enablement available for the specific System-on-Chip (SoC) subfamily. This folder includes clock-specific implementation, device register header files, device register feature header files, and the system configuration source files. Included with the standard SoC support are folders containing peripheral drivers, toolchain support, and a standard debug console. The device-specific header files provide a direct access to the microcontroller peripheral registers. The device header file provides an overall SoC memory mapped register definition. The folder also includes the feature header file for each peripheral on the microcontroller. The toolchain folder contains the startup code and linker files for each supported toolchain. The startup code efficiently transfers the code execution to the main() function.

Board support

The boards folder provides the board-specific demo applications, driver examples, and middleware examples.

Demo application and other examples

The demo applications demonstrate the usage of the peripheral drivers to achieve a system level solution. Each demo application contains a readme file that describes the operation of the demo and required setup steps. The driver examples demonstrate the capabilities of the peripheral drivers. Each example implements a common use case to help demonstrate the driver functionality.

RTOS

FreeRTOS

Real-time operating system for microcontrollers from Amazon

Middleware

Wireless Connectivity Framework

The Connectivity Framework is a software component that provides hardware abstraction modules to the upper layer connectivity stacks and components. It also provides a list of services and APIs, such as, Low power, Over the Air (OTA) Firmware update, File System, Security, Sensors, Serial Connectivity Interface (FSCI), and others. The Connectivity Framework modules are located in the middleware\wireless\framework SDK folder.

Wireless EdgeFast Bluetooth PAL

For more information, see the MCUXpresso SDK EdgeFast Bluetooth Protocol Abstraction Layer User’s Guide.

Ethermind BT/BLE Stack

nxp_bt_ble_stack

coreHTTP

coreHTTP

wpa_supplicant-rtos

NXP Wi-Fi WPA Supplicant

NXP Wi-Fi

The MCUXpresso SDK provides driver for NXP Wi-Fi external modules. The Wi-Fi driver is integrated with LWIP TCPIP stack and demonstrated with several network applications (iperf and AWS IoT).

For more information, see Getting Started with NXP based Wireless Modules and i.MX RT Platform Running on RTOS (document: UM11441).

Voice Seeker (no AEC)

VoiceSeeker is a multi-microphone voice control audio front-end signal processing solution. VoiceSeeker is not featuring acoustic echo cancellation (AEC).

Voice intelligent technology library

Voice Intelligent Technology (VIT) Library provides wake word and voice command engine for voice control

VG-Lite GPU Library

VGLite library for devices with VGLite graphics hardware acceleration engine

USB Type-C PD Stack

See the MCUXpresso SDK USB Type-C PD Stack User’s Guide (document MCUXSDKUSBPDUG) for more information

USB Host, Device, OTG Stack

See the MCUXpresso SDK USB Stack User’s Guide (document MCUXSDKUSBSUG) for more information.

TinyCBOR

Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) Library

TF-M

Trusted Firmware - M Library

PSA Test Suite

Arm Platform Security Architecture Test Suite

Mbed Crypto

Mbed Crypto library

SDMMC stack

The SDMMC software is integrated with MCUXpresso SDK to support SD/MMC/SDIO standard specification. This also includes a host adapter layer for bare-metal/RTOS applications.

PKCS#11

The PKCS#11 standard specifies an application programming interface (API), called “Cryptoki,” for devices that hold cryptographic information and perform cryptographic functions. Cryptoki follows a simple object based approach, addressing the goals of technology independence (any kind of device) and resource sharing (multiple applications accessing multiple devices), presenting to applications a common, logical view of the device called a “cryptographic token”.

Multicore

Multicore Software Development Kit

MCU Boot

Open source MCU Bootloader.

mbedTLS

mbedtls SSL/TLS library v2.x

lwIP

The lwIP TCP/IP stack is pre-integrated with MCUXpresso SDK and runs on top of the MCUXpresso SDK Ethernet driver with Ethernet-capable devices/boards.

For details, see the lwIP TCPIP Stack and MCUXpresso SDK Integration User’s Guide (document MCUXSDKLWIPUG).

lwIP is a small independent implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite.

eIQ

The package contains several example applications using the eIQ TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers library.

eIQ machine learning SDK containing:

Arm CMSIS-NN library (neural network kernels optimized for Cortex-M cores)
Inference engines:
- TensorFlow Lite Micro
- DeepView RT
Example code for TensorFlow Lite Micro, Glow, and DeepView RT

LVGL

LVGL Open Source Graphics Library

llhttp

HTTP parser llhttp

LittleFS

LittleFS filesystem stack

JPEG library

JPEG library

FreeMASTER

FreeMASTER communication driver for 32-bit platforms.

File systemFatfs

The FatFs file system is integrated with the MCUXpresso SDK and can be used to access either the SD card or the USB memory stick when the SD card driver or the USB Mass Storage Device class implementation is used.

emWin

The MCUXpresso SDK is pre-integrated with the SEGGER emWin GUI middleware. The AppWizard provides developers and designers with a flexible tool to create stunning user interface applications, without writing any code.

DSP Neural Networks

DSP Neural Networks Framework based on Xtensa Neural Networks Library from Cadence Design Systems for Xtensa HiFi Audio Engines.

NatureDSP for FusionF1

Digital Signal Processing for Xtensa FusionF1 DSP Audio Engines.

DSP Audio Streamer

DSP Audio Streamer Framework based on Xtensa Audio Framework from Cadence Design Systems for Xtensa DSP Audio Engines.

DSP Codecs for FusionF1

DSP Codecs for FusionF1

cJSON

Ultralightweight JSON parser in ANSI C

AWS IoT

Amazon Web Service (AWS) IoT Core SDK.

CMSIS DSP Library

The MCUXpresso SDK is shipped with the standard CMSIS development pack, including the prebuilt libraries.

Release contents

Provides an overview of the MCUXpresso SDK release package contents and locations.

Deliverable	Location
Boards	INSTALL_DIR/boards
Demo Applications	INSTALL_DIR/boards/<board_name>/demo_apps
Driver Examples	INSTALL_DIR/boards/<board_name>/driver_examples
eIQ examples	INSTALL_DIR/boards/<board_name>/eiq_examples
Board Project Template for MCUXpresso IDE NPW	INSTALL_DIR/boards/<board_name>/project_template
Driver, SoC header files, extension header files and feature header files, utilities	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>
CMSIS drivers	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>/cmsis_drivers
Peripheral drivers	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>/drivers
Toolchain linker files and startup code	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>/<toolchain_name>
Utilities such as debug console	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>/utilities
Device Project Template for MCUXpresso IDE NPW	INSTALL_DIR/devices/<device_name>/project_template
CMSIS Arm Cortex-M header files, DSP library source	INSTALL_DIR/CMSIS
Components and board device drivers	INSTALL_DIR/components
RTOS	INSTALL_DIR/rtos
Release Notes, Getting Started Document and other documents	INSTALL_DIR/docs
Tools such as shared cmake files	INSTALL_DIR/tools
Middleware	INSTALL_DIR/middleware

Known issues

This section lists the known issues, limitations, and/or workarounds.

New Project Wizard compile failure

The following components request the user to manually select other components that they depend upon in order to compile.

These components depend on several other components and the New Project Wizard (NPW) is not able to decide which one is needed by the user.

Note: xxx means core variants, such as, cm0plus, cm33, cm4, cm33_nodsp.

**Components:**issdk_mag3110, issdk_host, systick, gpio_kinetis, gpio_lpc, issdk_mpl3115, sensor_fusion_agm01, sensor_fusion_agm01_lpc, issdk_mma845x, issdk_mma8491q, issdk_mma865x, issdk_mma9553, and CMSIS_RTOS2.CMSIS_RTOS2, and components which include cache driver, such as enet_qos.

Also for low-level adapter components, currently the different types of the same adapter cannot be selected at the same time.

For example, if there are two types of timer adapters, gpt_adapter and pit_adapter, only one can be selected as timer adapter

in one project at a time. Duplicate implementation of the function results in an error.

Note: Most of middleware components have complex dependencies and are not fully supported in new project wizard. Adding a middleware component may result in compile failure.

CMSIS PACK new project compile failure

The generated configuration cannot be applied globally. The components, serial_manager_usb_cdc_virtual and serial_manager_usb_cdc_virtual_xxx (xxx means core variants like cm0plus, cm33, cm4, and cm33_nodsp) are unsupported for new project wizard of CMSIS pack and will lead to compile failure if selected while creating new project(s).

IAR cannot debug RAM application with J-Link

Currently, IAR will call J-Link reset after the application is downloaded to SRAM, but such operation will cause SRAM data lost.

Here is a workaround to avoid real reset, with the cost of no any reset during the debugging, and hardware status uncleared.

Build and debug IAR project once and see the settings folder created.
Create the _.JLinkScript file in the settings folder with the following contents.
```
void ResetTarget(void) {
JLINK_TARGET_Halt();
}
```
Debug the project again and now it can work.

Wireless EdgeFast Bluetooth PAL

For more information, see the MCUXpresso SDK EdgeFast Bluetooth Protocol Abstraction Layer User’s Guide.

Examples hello_world_ns, secure_faults_ns, and secure_faults_trdc_ns have incorrect library path in GUI projects

When the affected examples are generated as GUI projects, the library linking the secure and non-secure worlds has an incorrect path set. This causes linking errors during project compilation.

Examples: hello_world_ns, hello_world_s, secure_faults_ns, secure_faults_s, secure_faults_trdc_ns, secure_faults_trdc_s

Affected toolchains: mdk, iar

Workaround: In the IDE project settings for the non-secure (_ns) project, find the linked library (named hello_world_s_CMSE_lib.o, or similar, depending on the example project) and replace the path to the library with <build_directory>/<secure_world_project_folder>/<IDE>/, replacing the subdirectory names with the build directory, the secure world project name, and IDE name.