NXP Semiconductors, catering to customers building industrial and other embedded electronics, said that it would guarantee the supply of its microcontrollers for 15 years after the initial product announcement. The company wants to keep the components stocked so that customers are not forced to redesign products to accommodate new chips, a potentially costly inconvenience.
Emmanuel Sambuis, NXP’s vice president of microcontrollers and connectivity, said that “customers can invest in their designs today and rest assured they will be able to leverage Kinetis solutions across the lifespan of their products, ranging from wearables and smart home devices to products for connected cities and a wide range of healthcare, commercial and industrial IoT applications.”
Many companies keep microcontrollers in production to support embedded applications with longer lifespans than consumer products, such as smartphones and personal computers. Previously, the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based NXP supported most microcontrollers for a decade, though it occasionally gave extensions for medical and automotive applications. NXP's Kinetis line spans general-purpose as well as application-specific chips based on Arm’s Cortex M4 and Cortex M0+ cores.