May 8, 2014, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company contributing to customers across a wide range of electronic applications, announced that it has completed full verification of its latest microcontroller, the STM32L0, and has completed its entry into ST and distributors, preparing to support customer applications in achieving record-low power consumption. The STM32L0 is a product line that combines energy-efficient ARM® Cortex®-M0+ cores, an optimized architecture, power management modes, ultra-low power peripherals, support for energy-saving USB features, and ST’s proprietary ultra-low power process technology for continuous application operation.

Power consumption during operation is as low as 87µA/MHz, and 440nA in stop mode while retaining data in full RAM. With a low-power time counter and a fast wake-up time of 3.5µs, it helps applications maximize the use of energy-saving modes. Designing consumer electronics such as computer peripherals, healthcare monitors and trackers, industrial sensors, and smart home devices using the STM32L0 series enables market-leading battery life and allows for thinner and lighter product designs. While current consumption increases sharply with rising temperatures for other chips, the STM32L0 utilizes ST’s proprietary process technology to maintain stability over a wide temperature range, achieving the world's lowest power consumption even at 125°C. It also boasts the world's lowest Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) power consumption. The 12-bit on-chip ADC consumes only 48µA when operating at 100ksps. In addition, the ADC resolution is improved to 16 bits through built-in hardware oversampling.

The STM32L0 series consists of more than 30 part numbers and includes standard configurations along with variants featuring USB connectivity and options for up to 8x28 LCD controllers. The USB full-speed supported chips support crystal-less operation, USB Battery Charger Detection (BCD), and Link Power Management (LPM) for energy saving.

With enhanced STM32CubeMX design tool support now available for the STM32L0, including the Power Consumption Calculator wizard, it will help achieve ultra-low power consumption targets when designing with the STM32L0. STM32CubeMX allows for faster generation of initialization code and simplifies design porting to other STM32 chips. A new STM32L0 Nucleo board featuring Morpho and Arduino-compatible connectors and full support from mbed.org is scheduled for release in the middle of this year.

ST plans to further enrich the STM32L0 ecosystem by releasing an additional Discovery Kit that supports users in measuring MCU power consumption in real time by hosting ePaper displays, linear capacitive touch, and self-test measurement systems. The STM32L0 Discovery Kit will also be released in the middle of this year. Both the STM32L0 Nucleo board and the Discovery Kit can use the ST-LINK/V2 hardware debugger.

Optimized sample code snippets specifically for STM32L0 MCUs are also available on Nucleo boards and Discovery kits, which will provide greater assistance to designs requiring low-power consumption profiles.

The new STM32L0 microcontroller is available in various packages ranging from 2.7mm x 2.7mm WLCSP36 to 10mm x 10mm LQFP64, and memory is provided with up to 64KB flash, 8KB SRAM, and 2KB EEPROM.