NXP acknowledged that “The mbed platform has grown in popularity and feature set, now providing free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional rapid prototyping of products based on ARM microcontrollers.” Some of the new boards include features such as shield connectors to support the Arduino UNO environment and Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity. The new boards use v7.1 of the LPCXpresso IDE, which according to NXP includes “multiple improvements in compiler optimisations, IDE speed and feature set, access to ARM’s latest lib-nano C library for more efficient code generation, and support for Segger’s debug probe and related utilities”.

ARM director of IoT Simon Ford explained “We learnt from the web and smartphone revolutions that by building an open-source software platform with reusable software components and free development and collaboration tools, we can enable the creation of IoT and smart devices on a previously unimagined scale”.