STMicroelectronics (ST) 2018 STM32 Summit

From April 25th to 26th, 2018, the 3rd STM32 China Summit will be held in Shenzhen. Cao Jindong, Director of Market and Application, China Microcontroller Business Unit believes that IoT not only needs low-cost, low-power MCU nodes, but also needs The MCU acts as a gateway and performs real-time control processing. "Because IoT is an ecosystem, including the application side, the processing end, the cloud side, and then back to the final control end, the MCU cannot be separated."

At the STM32 summit last year, Daniel Colonna, director of marketing for the STMicroelectronics Microcontroller Division, proudly stated that since the launch of the STM32 product in 2007, 2017, the cumulative shipments of MCUs have reached more than 2 billion in a decade. And this year, "Now, we are delivering 32 STM32s per second globally, which is equivalent to 1 billion shipments per year. And we have greatly increased production capacity," Daniel Colonna said in a keynote speech.

Daniel Colonna, Marketing Director, STMicroelectronics Microcontrollers.

In Daniel Colonna's view, innovation is very important. In the 11 years of STM32 development, 11 series products have been mass-produced, but this year ST brought a brand new product series, which is the 12th series STM32WB in the STM32 family. Daniel Colonna explained, “W stands for wireless, B stands for Bluetooth, which combines the ecosystem and architecture of STM32 with open RF."

Daniel Colonna said that although ST has many wireless products, such as the RF transceiver SPIRIT, there is also a BlueNRG integrated with a CPU and RF transceiver. But now IoT's protocols, network specifications, etc. are becoming more and more complex, so there are more product combinations and more RF products, so there is STM32WB.

STM32's global shipments in the past three years.

With 2 CPUs, 2 modems, and RF transceivers, the STM32WB can cover more applications, especially wireless applications, and you can choose different products or solutions based on different applications.

He also stressed that the purpose of ST is to make the work of developers easier. In the dual core of STM32WB, M0+ is responsible for the protocol stack; M4 is responsible for the application. “If you use L4 products, you will use STM32WB products, which can still use the STM32 ecosystem. It should be available on the market at the end of this year and will be introduced to the mass market. Now our samples have come out.”

How to reduce costs is also a matter for system vendors to consider. ST will also introduce the smallest STM32L4 this year. The product will have two 12-bit ADCs, and the on-chip flash memory capacity will drop to 64KB, helping customers achieve cost savings.

According to Daniel Colonna, ST will also introduce a higher-performance dual-core STM32H7 product, which will be based on dual-core (Arm Cortex-M7 @ 480 MHz + Arm Cortex-M4 @ 240 MHz) for more complex applications.

In addition, STM32 will be added to Linux system support. Daniel Colonna said, "Because more and more embedded application companies are not just adopting RTOS."

Daniel Colonna believes that security is a very important aspect of ST. ST will launch the Arm Cortex-M33-based STM32 product, which supports the Trust Zone. By adopting the STM32 architecture, higher security can be achieved, not only in the microcontroller, but also in providing more security services. This product will also be sampling this year.

Develop STM32 IoT Security Toolbox

In addition to adding security features on the chip side, ST has always been concerned about the security issues of MCUs in terms of ecosystems. Daniel Colonna said in a speech, "Implementing scalable embedded security features on STM32, such as STM32Trust.CodeProtect, ensures that user code is securely and completely written to trusted STM32 products, including secure installation, secure programming; STM32Trust.DataProtect Protect valuable data from being stolen, including data protection, critical storage protection; STM32Trust.ExecutionProtect, which divides applications into trusted and untrusted parts, including code execution isolation."

To help engineers better develop, ST recently acquired software development tool expert Atollic, which developed the industry-renowned highly-recognized TrueSTUDIO integrated development environment (IDE), focusing on the embedding of Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers. Development community, for example, STMicroelectronics' STM32 series MCUs. "This company is a partner in our Microcontroller Business Unit and we will now be developing STM32 development tools. It will be part of our development tools," said Daniel Colonna.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a new direction of development. Many companies are investing in artificial intelligence, and ST's idea is to ensure that there are as few simple tools as possible to achieve artificial intelligence on STM32.

At the summit, ST introduced an STM32Cube.AI tool that helps engineers convert AI algorithms running on other platforms into algorithms that can run on STM32 MCUs. Artificial intelligence algorithms that can be run include image classification, speech recognition, and the like.

Artificial intelligence based on STM32

STM32 Summit Booth Show