Freescale offers its Kinetis K10 – K60 series with TOWER System development boards support. ST comes with STM32F4xx, NXP with LPC4xxx, TI with LM4Fxxx. Production samples are available from all mentioned vendors.

Credits go to NXP and EBV for their special offer of free LPCXpresso demo/evaluation boards  equipped with the target LPC1114 CortexM0 MCU. As NXP stated:

“With over 45 DMIPS of performance compared to the sub-DMIP performance typical of 8-bit MCUs and to 3-5 DMIPS for 16-bit MCUs, NXP’s LPC1100L can not only execute basic control tasks but also sophisticated algorithms, making even the most complex tasks within reach. Shorter time to do more tasks translates directly into lower energy consumption. This level of performance is delivered at 50 MHz, with extensive power optimization, at less than 10 mA.

Based on the ARM Cortex-M0 processor, the LPC1100L microcontroller delivers the industry’s lowest 32-bit active power consumption at 130 μA/MHz and reduces deep sleep current by a dramatic 60 percent.”

The power consumption parameter 130 μA/MHz in fact correlates with other CMOS process architectures implemented today.

For developers is most important the volume of product errata, quality of documentation and development boards/samples support. The  LPCXpresso demo board has an hardware debugger based on secured LPC3xxx ARM9 core and the communication protocol is closed proprietary, so the user is limited to use a software debugger suite by CodeRed only. It’s serious limitation but for such a demo board is acceptable.