STmicroelectronics Moves Into Cortex-M3 with its STM32

Oct. 3, 2007

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.

William G. Wong

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

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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