STMicroelectronics is leading the way in providing developers with development flexibility and reducing development costs by introducing new microcontrollers (MCUs) that perfectly balance price and performance.

STMicroelectronics today launched a new series of high-performance STM32H5 microcontrollers (MCUs) that provide state-of-the-art security features with the STM32TrusTEE Secure Manager.

The new STM32H5 MCU features Arm®'s embedded core, the Cortex®-M33.

The Cortex®-M33 is optimized for mid-range MCU-based applications by combining high performance with security, energy efficiency, and economy. In fact, this MCU delivers the world's highest performance among Cortex-M33-based products, achieving an EEMBC CoreMark® industry reference score of 1023 with an execution speed of 250MHz and 375 DMIPS.

The STM32H5 series is designed to accelerate mass innovation in the next generation of smart connected devices, bringing more intelligence at the edge and enhancing security for IoT assets.

The Cortex-M33 core features Arm’s TrustZone® architecture, on which ST has added a number of its own security features, including some developed with ST Authorized Partner ProvenRun.

The STM32H5 is the first MCU series to come with System-on-Chip (SoC) security services accessed through industry-standard APIs.

This feature, called STM32TrusTEE Security Manager, provides security services developed according to known use cases, saving developers the time it takes to write their own code. This supports easy development while ensuring effective protection.

It provides more enhanced security mechanisms such as two-level RoT through iRoT (immutable Root of Trust) and uRoT (updatable Root of Trust). This has the advantage of freeing developers from having to rely on external hardware security modules, giving embedded systems professionals much greater flexibility while maintaining the most basic aspects of their security policies.

This allows developers and users to easily achieve PSA and SESIP Level 3 certification for their products.

Challenging the perception that increased performance means developers have to compromise on power, the STM32H5 MCUs leverage ST’s advanced 40nm CMOS process technology and improved on-chip power-conversion circuitry to also improve energy efficiency.

With this MCU, power dissipation is no longer a constraint, even when using 250MHz devices in harsh environments where ambient temperatures can reach 125°C.

Additionally, it supports SIL certification of products that must meet appropriate SIL (Safety Integrity Level) requirements, with basic hardware capabilities to address a wide range of industrial and medical applications.

The new MCUs are typically used in applications such as air conditioning systems, home appliances, alarm systems, industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs), motor control, industrial pumps, communication gateways, lighting control, and energy conversion. They are also used in PC peripherals and consumer products such as smartphones and accessories.

The new MCUs are priced at $1.44 in quantities of 10,000 for the 128KB flash-enabled device in the UFQFPN32 package. The 2MB flash-enabled device is priced at $2.93. Production is now underway with the STM32H503 and STM32H563, with the full family and package options following in June.