Electronic compoments move in classical and readily defined phases none more pronounced than the evolutions and revolutions of the MCU. The industry has already entered its latest phase, "Peripheral Count", with the wide adoption of 32-bit micros, principally enabled by ARM's empowering Cortex cores.
ARM’s cores are selected by the majority of MCU vendors today in a wide variety of solutions, allowing these vendors to concentrate on efficient integration of the core subsystem with powerful peripheral and memory configurations. These decisions have motivated the leading 3rd party tools suppliers to support ARM based cores. In turn, this leads engineers to recognise that ARM releases them from the limiting stranglehold of a proprietary based core, providing access to the latest code-efficient and easy to use platform. The freedom of this approach allows the engineer to devote more of his time and skills in writing his application, rather than devising increasingly complex tricks to run older architectures at their limits.
For all but the very smallest memory sizes and pincount microcontrollers, the percentage of die-area taken up by the core is negligible. In fact, as the ARM core lends itself to the latest process technologies,when even modest memory and peripheral mixes are applied, the unit costs can be very competitive versus 8-bit solutions.
STMicroelectronics embraced the Cortex-M concept at a very early stage with the STM32 family. Today the STM32 family contains more than 200 devices with many more planned over the coming year. See www.st.com/stm32.
With STM32 unit prices competitively set and low cost development tools, the STM32 offers a game changing software platform for the future. We believe it is “Time to Change”. Many of your competitors already have.
Article by Ollie Althorpe
Managing Director
STMicroelectronics Limited
