June 18, 2014, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (hereinafter ST), a global semiconductor company contributing to customers across diverse electronic applications and a major supplier of embedded microcontrollers, announced that cumulative shipments of its STM8 8-bit microcontroller have surpassed 1 billion units. ST's one billionth product was supplied to Lutron Electronics (hereinafter Lutron), a lighting control product manufacturer.

The STM8 product family is a general-purpose microcontroller offering excellent performance coupled with cost efficiency, making it suitable for various industrial and consumer applications. It combines a high-performance 8-bit core and an advanced set of peripherals, making it also suitable for automotive and low-voltage or battery-powered products.

Daniel Colonna, Marketing Director of ST's Microcontroller Division, stated, "ST has long incorporated feedback from many customers including Lutron to develop the STM8 product with embedded non-volatile data memory, achieving a high level of integration, and enabling excellent analog performance across a wide voltage range from 1.65V to 5.5V." He added, "Achieving cumulative shipments of 1 billion units in just five years, coupled with Lutron's continued commitment and confidence in this microcontroller, demonstrates how valuable the STM8 is to ST, our customers, and the market."

The industry has recently been trending toward reducing overall system costs, and the STM8 platform is an ideal product for this. The microcontroller adopts Harvard architecture. This architecture includes 16-bit index registers and stack pointers, 16-megabyte (Mbyte) linear address space, advanced addressing modes, and features designed for optimized C-programming support, thereby delivering optimal CPU performance in both speed and code density. Additionally, utilizing a 3-stage pipeline, it provides a maximum processing speed of 20 MIPS at 24MHz, and features a core with an average of 1.6 cycles per instruction.

Furthermore, the STM8 platform provides up to 128K of on-chip flash program memory along with a true embedded EEPROM featuring durability and lifespan performance comparable to external components. Through technology options, it is also possible to significantly reduce high-speed operation or power consumption.