STmicroelectronics Moves Into Cortex-M3 with its STM32

The Cortex-M3 looks to be the mainstay of low-end 32-bit ARM platforms and STmicroelectronics intends to stay at the forefront with its 72MHz STM32 family. It runs from a low end, 36MHz, 32 Kbyte flash version in a 48-pin LQFP to a 128 Kbyte 100-pin package. The STM32 has the typical Cortex peripheral complement including 3 USARTs, 2 SPI ports, 2 I2C ports, some timers including a pair of watchdog timers, 7 DMA channels and lots of shared IO pins. The system has a 7 channel DMA controller. Analog peripherals include a 12-bit ADC. High end versions support USB, CAN and PWM timers for motor control. Separate on-chip clocks drive the processor and the real time clock. The eval board adds a 240 by 320 pixel TFT color LCD, induction motor control connectors, 8 Mbytes of serial flash, a MicroSD socket for the 64 Mbyte MicroSD card, and back up battery for the real time clock. Similar packages are available from HiTex, IAR, Keil and Rasonance. Related Links STmicroelectronics