Nuvoton has launched the NuMicro M3331 series, a family of Arm Cortex-M33 microcontrollers that natively control ARGB LED strips without burdening the CPU. The 180 MHz MCUs integrate an Enhanced LED Light Strip Interface (ELLSI) and up to 10 standard LLSI channels, supporting gaming ARGB Gen1 and Gen2 protocols for fluid LED effects in smart factories, renewable energy systems, and consumer devices.

The M3331 series comes in two variants. The M3333 series provides up to 110 I/O pins and features like CAN FD, I3C, and up to 512 KB flash with 320 KB SRAM. The M3334 series adds a USB 2.0 High-Speed OTG controller with integrated PHY while offering up to 102 I/O pins. Both variants include TrustZone security, a single-precision FPU, DSP instructions, and up to 28 channels of Parallel Dimming Communication Interface supporting Bi-phase Mark Coding.

Beyond LED control, the MCUs pack extensive peripherals including up to 48 PWM channels, a 12-bit SAR ADC sampling at 4.2 Msps, SD card host controller, Quad-SPI, and multiple communication interfaces (I2C up to 3.4 Mbps, CAN FD, I2S). Power consumption sits at 91 μA/MHz during normal operation and drops to 0.62 μA in deep power-down mode. The chips operate from 1.7V to 3.6V across a temperature range of -40°C to +105°C (-40°F to +221°F) and ship in QFN and LQFP packages ranging from 4x4 mm (0.2x0.2 inches) to 14x14 mm (0.6x0.6 inches).

Nuvoton supports the platform with NuMaker-M3333KI and NuMaker-M3334KI evaluation boards featuring Arduino UNO-compatible headers and an integrated Nu-Link2-Me debugger module. The boards include dedicated ammeter connectors for power profiling and cost $30 (€28) each on the Nuvoton Direct eStore. Board Support Packages support Arm Keil MDK, IAR EWARM, and Visual Studio Code, with compatibility for FreeRTOS, Zephyr, RT-Thread, emWin, and LVGL. The NuMaker-M3334KI board is officially supported in the Zephyr Project documentation as of the latest releases, providing open-source developers with upstream RTOS support for the M3334 variant. Nuvoton also maintains the OpenNuvoton GitHub organization with development tools including a customized OpenOCD fork for device programming and debugging.