Leading MCUs enable both smart & secure things

ST's early decision to create the STM32 range of MCUs around ARM cores has been an outstanding success, resulting in an unrivalled range of 32-bit MCUs that include performance enhancing innovations such as ST’s Adaptive Real-Time accelerators and its rich set of on-chip peripherals. These peripherals include low-power, high-performance analog functions, and DSP extensions, among others.

The billion-plus devices shipped to date have been used in applications as varied as industrial, consumer, IoT, mobile and health, fitness, and wearable applications. The range of MCUs covers computing needs that extend from ultra-low power consumption to high-performance embedded-computing engines.

Successful adoption of the STM32 family has been enhanced by the strength of its comprehensive development ecosystem, which includes impressive, yet very inexpensive STM32 Discovery kits, STM32 Nucleo boards, and expansion boards. The STM32 development kits and boards, with almost 700,000 units shipped to date, are complemented with easy-to-use and free STM32Cube development tools, the STM32 Open Development Environment, and a plethora of third-party tools. The breadth, usefulness and economy of the STM32 ecosystem have contributed to adoption of the STM32 family in multiple university programmes.

"The scale of ST’s ARM-based MCU deployment is impressive when you consider our combined technologies are now in more than a billion devices,” said James McNiven, General Manager, CPU Group, ARM. “But scale is only one factor as ST is also providing diversity with 600ARM-based MCUs now available to its customers. This is vital in a global market where device families must be extremely versatile in order to succeed across an expanding smart connected world.”

In addition to the ARM Cortex-M cores, ST uses many ARM cores as the basis for a wide range of products, from general-purpose and secure MCUs to the most advanced SoC (System-on-Chip) solutions for Smart Industry and the Smart Home. The ST31/ ST33 range of secure MCUs are all based on ARM SecurCore processors (SC000 and SC300, respectively) and cover many applications such as Embedded Secure Element and NFC SIM for mobile phones, bank cards, M2M (Machine-to-Machine), and electronic ID documents.

"ST and ARM have a close relationship that has benefited both companies and the wider technology ecosystem over the years," said Claude Dardanne, Executive Vice President and General Manager Microcontroller, Memory and Secure MCU Group STMicroelectronics. "By using ARM IP, we have been able to focus on our own key skills - listening to customers and delivering optimized silicon solutions."

ST and ARM continue to collaborate on new technologies such as ST’s support for the ARM mbed IoT Device Platform by ensuring its expanding range of STM32 Nucleo development systems and accompanying software ecosystems are fully mbed-enabled.