July 16, 2014, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company contributing to customers across a wide range of electronic applications, has launched the new STM32 Dynamic Efficiency™ microcontroller, the STM32F411. This new product is characterized by improved power-saving performance for data batching technology, which is also used to maximize battery life in the latest Google Android 4.4 (KitKat) operating system, and is designed to provide various benefits to a wide range of applications beyond smartphones and tablets.

Android 4.4 can reduce battery consumption of the main system processor by managing 'always-on' sensors, such as accelerometers and pressure sensors, using a low-power sensor hub. The new STM32F411 Dynamic Efficiency microcontroller is ideal for sensor hub applications due to its improved performance resulting from lower dynamic power and higher integration density. Additionally, Batch Acquisition Mode (BAM) allows sensor data to be stored directly in SRAM while the CPU core is in sleep mode, saving up to an additional 50% of power. The core is briefly activated to process the stored data before switching back to sleep mode.

The STM32F411 is a versatile chip widely used in various industrial and consumer applications. It is equipped with new power-saving technologies such as Flash-Stop mode as well as BAM, making it useful for applications such as industrial controllers, medical monitors, building automation, and wearable technology. If you select the smallest package of 3.034mm x 3.22mm, it can also be used in confined spaces.

The STM32F411 features an ARM® Cortex®-M4 processor core with an integrated DSP and Floating-Point Unit (FPU), with a flash memory size of up to 512KB and an SRAM capacity of up to 128Kbyte. It minimizes dynamic power consumption and enhances processing performance by utilizing ST’s ART Accelerator™ branch cache technology, 90nm process, and voltage scaling capabilities. It is the industry’s first M4-class chip to achieve a run-mode current of 100µA/MHz when running EEMBC® CoreMark™ code from flash with peripherals turned off, and it can operate at up to 100MHz to deliver 125 DMIPS performance. Stop-mode current is also very low, amounting to only 10µA when all SRAM contents and context are stored.

The STM32F411 is suitable for demanding environments or applications, as it features an extended temperature range of -40°C to 105°C, a low-voltage supply down to 1.7V, and numerous peripheral options. The peripheral set includes one 12-bit 16-channel ADC with up to 2.4 million samples per second, up to 11 timers including motor control timers and general-purpose 16-bit and 32-bit timers, and various communication interfaces. These interfaces include three I2C ports with speeds up to 1 Mbps, three USARTs with speeds up to 12.5 Mbps, one USB 2.0 OTG full-speed interface with an integrated PHY, five I2S audio interfaces, five SPI ports providing speeds up to 50 Mbit per second, and one SD/MMC interface. It is available in all package options, including the chip package with the fewest pins.