Microcontrollers Suit Ultra Low-Power Apps

STMicroelectronics has combined its ultra-low-power microcontroller technology with ARM® Cortex®-M4 know-how to create the STM32L4 series for next-generation energy-conscious consumer, industrial, medical, and metering applications.

The first two microcontrollers in the series, the STM32L476 and STM32L486, feature the 80 MHz ARM Cortex-M4 core with DSP and floating-point unit (FPU). With the added advantage of the ST ART Accelerator™, which allows zero-wait execution from Flash, the devices achieve up to 100 DMIPS at just 100µA/MHz active power consumption. Up to 1MB of dual-bank Flash supports sophisticated applications and read-while-write capability in addition to 128KB of SRAM.

STM32L4 microcontrollers leverage the full richness of ST's low-power technologies, including dynamic voltage scaling to balance power consumption with processing demand, smart architecture with FlexPowerControl, and seven power-management modes with sub-mode options. These include Stop, Standby, and Shutdown with current as low as 30nA. ST's Batch Acquisition Mode (BAM) allows efficient data exchange with communication peripherals while in low-power mode.

The overall low power consumption, high performance and DSP capability of the Cortex-M4 core, smart analog features, and extensive digital connectivity of the new STM32L4 series make these devices ideal for smart connected and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, as well as a wide variety of industrial, medical, and consumer products.

STM32L4 devices are sampling now to lead customers, and general release is scheduled for Q2 2015. The STM32L476 is priced from $3.40 in the LQFP64 package, for orders of 10,000 pieces.