Advanced microcontrollers equipped with smart and security features that enable IoT

ST announced that it has achieved 1 billion shipments of the ARM® Cortex® core-based general-purpose microcontroller STM32 and 500 million shipments of the security microcontroller ST33, which features the ARM SecureCore® SC300 processor.

The early development of ARM core-based STM32 microcontrollers appears to have aligned well with market conditions. This is because it resulted in the creation of an unrivaled 32-bit microcontroller family that combines performance enhancement technologies, such as ST’s Adaptive Real-Time Accelerators (ART), with a rich set of on-chip peripherals. These peripherals include low-power, high-performance analog and DSP extensions.

More than one billion devices shipped to date have been applied in various fields, including industrial, consumer, IoT (Internet of Things), mobile, and health and fitness wearable applications. Microcontroller families are widely used in all fields requiring computational capabilities, ranging from ultra-low power consumption applications to high-performance embedded computing engines.

The ecosystem contributes to the developers' development environment.

The strength of the extensive development ecosystem also played a role in the successful adoption of the STM32 product family. The development ecosystem includes the affordable STM32 Discovery Kit, STM32 Nucleo boards, and expansion boards. Approximately 700,000 STM32 development kits and boards have been shipped to date and are supported by the user-friendly, free STM32Cube development tool, the STM32 Open Development Environment, and a wealth of third-party tools. Thanks to the STM32 ecosystem, which is useful in a wide range of fields and highly cost-effective, many university programs have decided to use the STM32 family of products.

James McNiven, Business General Manager of ARM’s CPU Group, said, “The number of devices combining the two companies’ technologies has exceeded one billion. The scale of ST’s expansion of ARM-based microcontrollers is truly remarkable,” adding, “But scale is not the only important thing. ST currently offers 600 different types of ARM-based MCUs to customers. This is an essential requirement in the global market, which values the versatility of device product families for success in the growing smart connected world.”

ST is utilizing ARM cores in a diverse range of products, ranging from ARM Cortex-M cores to general-purpose and security microcontrollers, as well as cutting-edge System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions used in smart industries and smart homes. ST31/ST33, which belongs to the ST31/ST33 security MCU product line, is based on ARM SecurCore processors (SC000 and SC300, respectively) and can be installed in various applications including embedded Secure Elements (eSE) and NFC SIMs for mobile phones, as well as bank cards, M2M (Machine-to-Machine), and electronic ID documents.

Claude Dardanne, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Microcontroller, Memory and Security MCU Group at ST, stated, “ST and ARM have a close relationship that benefits both companies and have expanded their technology ecosystem over the years. Thanks to the use of ARM IP, ST has been able to focus on its own core technologies to better focus on customer needs and provide optimized silicon solutions.”

ST and ARM continue to collaborate on new technologies. A good example of this is enabling support for the ARM mbed™ IoT device platform by ensuring that the STM32 Nucleo development system and related software ecosystem can operate fully within the mbed environment.