'World's first' ARM Cortex-M7 MCU produces 1000CoreMarks

3rd November 2014

Barney Scott

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Datasheet

STMicroelectronics has introduced an extension of its STM32 family of MCUs with the STM32 F7 MCU series, leveraging the ARM Cortex-M7 core, which is hailed as ARM’s most powerful Cortex-M processor. The STM32 F7 series leapfrogs the industry’s previous high-performance 32-bit Cortex-M leader, ST's STM32 F4, delivering up to twice as much processing and DSP performance that is accessible via a seamless upgrade path.

The F7 series operates at frequencies up to 200MHz and uses a six-stage superscalar pipeline and FPU to produce up to 1000CoreMarks. ST has included two independent mechanisms to reach 0-wait-state performance from both internal and external memories. ST's Adaptive Real-Time (ART) accelerator is used for internal embedded Flash and L1 cache for both execution and data access, internally and externally.

Despite greater functionality, the series’ Run mode and low-power modes (STOP, Standby, and V_BAT) consume current at the same low levels as the STM32 F4: 7CoreMarks/mW in Run mode and, for low-power modes, down to 120μA typical in STOP mode with all context and SRAM content saved, and 1.7μA typical in STANDBY mode and 0.1μA typical in V_BATmode. The F7 series is available in configurations of 512kB and 1MB embedded Flash to support applications that require large storage for code.

Manufactured on ST’s production-proven 90nm embedded-non-volatile memory CMOS process technology, the F7 series aims to help meet time-to-market demands. At the same time, the advanced, future-proof architecture offers significant headroom to deliver far greater MCU performance as the company moves to more advanced process geometries.

“ARM and ST have a long-standing and extensive business relationship, and it is exciting to see this extended to include MCUs based on the latest ARM Cortex-M7 processor,” said Noel Hurley, General Manager, CPU Group, ARM. “This partnership brings the benefits of the broadest ecosystem to a new set of performance- and reliability-demanding embedded applications.”

Daniel Colonna, MCU Marketing Director, STMicroelectronics, added; “ST has earned its place as the long-time leading supplier of Cortex-M MCUs by working closely with ARM as a lead partner and with our customers to ensure their time-to-market success. The strength of our development ecosystem, the breadth of our MCU, sensor, power, and communications portfolios, and the technical support we deliver to customers makes the STM32 F7 the seamlessly accessible natural extension to top our industry-leading portfolio. The new level of internal- and external-memory performance gives developers new possibilities for innovation, as they no longer need to optimise their code for performance and memory.”

The STM32F756NG MCU is sampling now to lead customers.