NXP's LPC1500 motorcontroller family is ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontrollers for embedded applications featuring a rich peripheral set with very-low power consumption. The ARM Cortex-M3 is a next-generation core that offers system enhancements such as enhanced debug features and a higher level of support-block integration. The LPC15xx family operates at CPU frequencies of up to 72 MHz. The ARM Cortex-M3 CPU incorporates a 3-stage pipeline and uses a Harvard architecture with separate local instruction and data buses, as well as a third bus for peripherals. The ARM Cortex-M3 CPU also includes an internal prefetch unit that supports speculative branching.

The LPC15xx family includes up to 256 kB of Flash memory, 32 kB of ROM, a 4 kB EEPROM, and up to 36 kB of SRAM. The peripheral compliment includes one full-speed USB 2.0 device, two SPI interfaces, three USARTs, one Fast-mode Plus (Fm+) I²C-bus interface, one C_CAN module, PWM/timer subsystem with four configurable, multi-purpose State Configurable Timers (SCTimer/PWM) with input pre-processing unit, a real-time clock module with independent power supply and a dedicated oscillator, two 12-channel/12-bit, 2 Msamples/sec ADCs, one 12-bit, 500 kSamples/sec DAC, four voltage comparators with internal voltage reference, and a temperature sensor. A DMA engine can service most peripherals.