March 10, 2015, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company contributing to customers across a wide range of electronic applications, introduced the STM32L4 series, which combines its ultra-low power microcontroller technology with the ARM® Cortex®-M4. The company plans to target next-generation applications sensitive to energy consumption in consumer, industrial, medical, and instrumentation sectors.

The STM32L476 and STM32L486 are the first products in this series, utilizing an 80MHz ARM Cortex-M4 core that includes a DSP and a Floating-Point Unit (FPU). With the addition of the ST ART Accelerator™, which enables zero-wait execution in flash, they can achieve performance of up to 100 DMIPS at an effective power consumption of 100μA/MHz. Dual-bank flash of up to 1MB, along with 128KB of SRAM, supports complex applications and simultaneous write/read capabilities.

The STM32L4 microcontroller utilizes various of ST’s low-power technologies. These include dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) to balance power consumption and processing performance, a smart architecture with FlexPowerControl, and seven power management modes with sub-mode options. The sub-mode options include stop and standby modes, and a shutdown mode with a current consumption of only 30nA. ST's BAM (Batch Acquisition Mode) enables efficient data exchange with communication peripherals while maintaining a low-power mode.

These new products scored 123 points in EEMBC™ ULPBench®, a standard benchmark test that compares the efficiency of ultra-low-power microcontrollers. “The ULPBench benchmark score of 123 points recorded by the STM32L4 is currently the highest in the industry and demonstrates that higher performance and large memory capacity can be achieved during development without increasing power consumption,” said Michel Buffa, Business General Manager of ST Microcontrollers.

The new STM32L4 series features Cortex-M4 cores with overall low power consumption, excellent performance, and DSP capabilities, as well as smart analog functions and extensive digital connectivity, making them ideal for industrial, medical, and consumer products, as well as smart connected and IoT applications.

STM32L4 devices are currently being sampled to key customers, and mass production is scheduled for the second quarter of 2015. The price of the STM32L476 starts at $3.40 for orders of 10,000 units in an LQFP64 package.