Push Forward With the i.MX 8X Applications Processor Family

peggy-nxp — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 22:23:31 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by peggy-nxp on 10/6/2021 10:23:31 PM

As cars and industrial machines become a cluster of sensors, processors, antennas and electronic actuators, NXP brings the i.MX 8X family to the broad market, building upon the i.MX applications processor series. This highly scalable, next generation processor family will provide a much-needed migration path for modern automotive and industrial devices, helping to advance the momentum in the transformation to digital technologies of classically analog machines.

The i.MX 8X applications processor family is an optimal solution for automotive clusters, infotainment systems, industrial HMI solutions and robotics.

With full Armv8-A 64-bit support while maintaining compatibility with 32-bit Armv7-A software, the i.MX 8X provides upgraded core performance while adding sensor, safety, connectivity and multimedia features. Each i.MX 8X family member has an additional M4 core for real-time processing, fast boot and power savings.

The i.MX 8X Family Features

The i.MX 8QuadXPlus is the full featured device with 4x Arm Cortex-A35 + 1x Arm Cortex-M4 cores.
The i.MX 8DualXPlus and i.MX 8DualX provides 2x Cortex-A35 cores, leaving 2x Cortex-A35 +1 Cortex-M4.
The Plus versions support a 32-bit DDR interface for LPDDR4 and DDR3L (LPDDR4 at 1200 MHz and DDR3L at 933 MHZ).
Advance Power Management- ASIL-B is available with the scalable PF8100/PF8200 PMIC.
Both i.MX 8QuadXPlus and i.MX 8DualXPlus support error correction code on the DDR3L memory.

Bringing SafeAssure Into View With the i.MX 8X Family

When it comes to functional safety, NXP stands for high quality and reliability. Our SafeAssure program connects experts with designers to share deep automotive and appliance safety knowledge, vast product development resources and strategic alliances with key industry partners—all with the end goal of helping you produce fully certified products that keep customers safe and satisfied. The SafeAssure program simplifies system-level functional safety requirements to help you build standardization, sustainability and compliance into your designs.

The recently qualified i.MX 8X applications processor family will be joining the legion of NXP solutions designed with safety critical usage in mind. Built with high-level integration to support graphics, video, image processing, audio and voice functions, the i.MX 8X processor family is ideal for systems requiring safety-certifiable and efficient performance.

The automotive industry is under pressure to provide new and improved vehicle safety systems, ranging from basic airbag-deployment systems to extremely complex advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) with accident prediction and collision avoidance capabilities. These safety functions are mainly carried out by electronics. The ISO 26262 functional safety standard was developed to enable the design of electronic systems that can prevent dangerous failures or control them if they occur. Our SafeAssure functional safety program is aligned with the international standards at the heart of automotive safety applications. This allows system engineers to design with confidence and efficiently achieve system-level compliance.

Optimal SoC for the Automotive Industry

Digital clusters have become standard in the automotive industry, and the i.MX 8X processors provide outstanding performance for sophisticated graphical interfaces while allowing for additional features such as:

Drowsiness detection via the MIPI-CSI camera interfaces available
Optional second display output allowing heads up display features to be added using a single SOC
Detection, leveraging the broad NXP sensor portfolio
Connectivity, providing compatibility with leading wireless communication technologies

HMI/Industrial Applications + Vision

In the industrial realm, i.MX 8X offers an even wider set of applications. Certainly one of the most interesting is the use of vision.Applications like operator detection, intelligent city monitoring and defect detection offer greater security, cost-reduction and optimization to industrial processes. The ability to see what the human eye cannot see, such as the use of night or infrared cameras with the processing power to infer those images, can prevent accidents, help with early deterioration detection protocols, identify threats and aid in search and rescue operations, helping save lives.

Whether designers are working on a next generation automotive cluster, infotainment system or industrial HMI solution, NXP’s product longevity program guarantees supply for many years to come. This peace of mind added to the continuous portfolio enhancements allow for future opportunities with reduced porting costs.

NXP Ecosystem and Partners Supporting the i.MX 8X Family

NXP and our embedded board system partners are gearing up to enable a more streamlined development process and faster time to production of these solutions. The following partners have early access to the i.MX 8X family:

Digi International will deliver the Digi ConnectCore 8X family of pre-certified, low-power SOMs and SBCs with fully integrated wireless connectivity and built-in Digi TrustFence security for connected industrial and medical applications.
PHYTEC launched the phyCORE-i.MX 8X SoM and Development Kit. Designed for safety, security and industrial control, the high-performance and energy efficient module features the NXP SE050 integrated cloud security chip, CAN-FD, display support and comes with PHYTEC engineering support, Linux BSP and long-term availability.
Toradex extended its successful SoM families with the Colibri iMX8X and Apalis iMX8X. These are ideal solutions for demanding applications and offer wireless connectivity, advanced hardware security and safety features. The extensive ecosystem and the ready-to-use Torizon Linux OS simplifies product development and maintenance.
TQ Systems GmbH is launching two embedded modules/platforms based on i.MX 8X for your reliable project development. The TQMa8Xx/MBa8Xx supports DDR3L w. ECC and also LPDDR4. The SMARC 2.1 based platform TQMa8XxS /MB-SMARC-2 supports LPDDR4. Both designs are available with a personal technical support program.
Variscite is offering a complete, production-ready product suite based on the i.MX 8X processor. The product suite was designed to deliver the best cost/performance and power-optimized solutions with a generous longevity commitment and includes the VAR-SOM-MX8X system-on-module, a complementary symphony-board SBC, the VAR-SOM-MX8X evaluation kits and full Linux/Android software support.

NXP’s i.MX ecosystem and technology alliances leverage the broad Arm community to further enable better customer solutions and faster time-to-market through access to tool chains, software, Codecs, middleware/applications, training and system integrators.

Let’s build!

Resources

For more information please visit our resource sites:

i.MX 8X Applications Processor Family
i.MX 8QuadXPlus Multisensory Enablement Kit (MEK)
i.MX Software and Development Tools
NXP Product Longevity Program
PF8100/PF8200 PMIC product page
Related Blog