Nuvoton has expanded its NuMicro MA35D0 lineup with three new LQFP128-packaged microprocessors and a compact evaluation board called the NuMaker-IoT-MA35D0-A2 (Chili Pro). The SoC pairs two 64-bit Arm Cortex-A35 application cores clocked at up to 650 MHz with a dedicated 180 MHz Cortex-M4 for real-time tasks, all in a 14 x 14 mm LQFP package. That packaging choice matters: LQFP is far more accessible for custom PCB designs than the BGA found on most application processors, lowering the barrier for small-run and prototype hardware. The three new chip variants, MA35D05KH67C, MA35D05KI67C, and MA35D05KJ67C, differ only in stacked DDR3L memory at 128 MB, 256 MB, and 512 MB, respectively.
The Chili Pro board measures 4.5 x 4.5 cm (1.8 x 1.8 inches) and manages to fit a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, a USB 2.0 Type-A host port, a micro-USB device port, USB-C for power, a microSD 3.0 slot, and 256 MB of quad-SPI NAND flash. Two GPIO expansion headers break out up to four CAN FD buses alongside SPI, I2C, I2S, ADC, and multiple UART interfaces, making it a natural fit for industrial gateways and sensor networks. Nuvoton bills it as "the industry's smallest Linux platform," though a handful of boards with smaller footprints exist.
The open source support is worth noting. Nuvoton's GitHub organization hosts the full BSP including NuWriter for flashing, Linux application examples, and a libjpeg-turbo library optimized for the chip's VC8000 video engine. Build system support covers Yocto 5.0 (Scarthgap) and Buildroot 2024.02, with the vendor kernel tracking Linux 6.6.y LTS and a 6.18.y fork also available. Upstream patches for the MA35D1 family, which shares the same core architecture, have been submitted to the Linux ARM kernel mailing list. The software stack rounds out with U-Boot, TF-A, and OP-TEE, plus hardware crypto accelerators for AES, RSA, and ECC.
The Chili Pro is listed on Nuvoton's TECHDesign store at $49 (€45). Pricing for the standalone MA35D05K MPUs has not been announced. Full specifications and documentation are available on the MA35D0 product page.
