Three major trends are shaping the MCU space
- Algorithms are increasing in complexity. For example, the desire to make motors more power efficient pushes up the CPU performance requirements
- Multiple subsystems are being consolidated into a single electronics board, to reduce system cost, footprint and power
- Platforms that were once closed "black box" systems are starting to include wired and/or wireless connectivity. This puts further pressures on processor performance requirements and provides additional challenges to the system designer to ensure high degrees of system security/reliability and embed enough latent performance to support future services that maybe delivered across the network to deployed platforms
The combination of these three factors has driven growth in the 32-bit MCU market over the past few years at a rate that outpaces by far the growth of the MCU market as a whole.
