April 29, 2014, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company serving customers across a wide range of electronic applications, announced that mass production of its new STM32F301/302/303 general-purpose microcontrollers has entered and sales have begun through distributors. Based on the ARM® Cortex®-M4 core, these new microcontrollers feature a Floating-Point Unit (FPU) and provide exceptional performance and SoC integration suitable for cutting-edge applications.

The new STM32F301 access product line has entered mass production as the market's first sub-$1 Cortex-M4 chip equipped with an FPU. Featuring 16KB of SRAM along with 32KB to 64KB of on-chip flash memory, these products allow for an easy start to ARM Cortex-M4 core-based MCU development. For the STM32F302 and STM32F303, the flash size has been expanded from 32KB to 256KB. The STM32F3 chip, equipped with up to 512KB of flash, is scheduled for release in the second half of this year.

The STM32F3 chip combines a 72MHz ARM Cortex-M4 core equipped with a DSP instruction set with an FPU featuring high-performance analog peripherals. This enables a high level of integration even in basic mixed-signal control applications. Furthermore, because it is fully compatible with the STM32F0 series, it offers the powerful advantage of using a single development platform. In the case of the STM32F303, performance (90 DMIPS) is superior because it is provided with Core-Coupled Memory (CCM-SRAM) that offers a 'routine boost' enabling flash memory execution speeds equivalent to CPU frequency execution of >100 MHz.

The newly released analog comparator with a response time of less than 30ns features a 5Msample/s 12-bit ADC, the fastest ADC on any ARM Cortex-based MCU, providing ultra-fast response times for control-critical applications such as digital power, sonar, motor control, lighting, or wireless chargers. This ultra-fast ADC supports oversampling capable of 16-bit resolution at 20ksamples/s and 18-bit resolution at 1.2ksamples/s, enhancing accuracy and making it ideal for applications such as sensor data processing, healthcare, power meters, power meters, and instruments. Additionally, the new STM32F302/303 chips reduce connectivity power consumption in USB-LPM (Link Power Management) mode.

The new mbed-compatible STM32F302 Nucleo board NUCLEO-F302R8 is sold for $10.32 and is included in ST's implementation ecosystem alongside the existing STM32F303 Discovery Kit, which will help engineers try out new ideas and quickly implement prototypes.