New Industry Products

Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers targeted at Energy-Sensitive Designs

April 29, 2014 by Jeff Shepard

The latest STM32L0 microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics, Inc. enable customers' applications to achieve record low power consumption, The micros leverage a combination of the energy-efficient ARM® Cortex®-M0+ core, optimized architecture, power-management modes, ultra-low-power peripherals, support for energy-saving USB features, and proprietary ultra-low-power process technology to keep applications running. With run consumption down to 87µA/MHz, 440nA stop mode with full RAM data retention, a low-power time counter, and fast wakeup time of 3.5µs the STM32L0 allows applications to maximize use of energy-saving modes. The STM32L0 series enables designers of products such as computer peripherals, healthcare monitors and trackers, industrial sensors, and smart-home devices to deliver market-leading battery life and create slim and lightweight new styles.

Where other devices suffer rapidly increasing current consumption at higher temperatures, ST’s unique process technology maintains stability over a wide temperature range, ensuring these devices offer the world’s lowest power consumption at 125 degrees C. The STM32L0 series also has the world’s lowest Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) power consumption. The 12-bit on-chip ADC draws only 48µA when operating at 100ksample/s. Built-in hardware oversampling increases the ADC resolution to 16-bits.

Over 30 part numbers offer basic entry-level configurations as well as variants featuring USB connectivity with the option of an LCD controller up to 8x28. USB full-speed enabled devices support crystal-less operation, USB Battery Charger Detection (BCD), and energy-saving Link Power Management (LPM).

Enhanced STM32CubeMX design tools, including the Power Consumption Calculator wizard now support the STM32L0, helping designers use the new devices to reach ultra-low power-consumption targets. STM32CubeMX helps accelerate generation of initialization code and simplifies porting of designs between different STM32 devices. A new STM32L0 Nucleo board featuring Morpho and Arduino-compatible connectors and fully supported by mbed.org will be also available in mid 2014.

ST will further enrich the STM32L0 ecosystem with a Discovery kit that will host an ePaper display as well as a linear capacitive touch and self-test measurement system enabling users to measure MCU power consumption in real-time. The STM32L0 Discovery-kit will also be available in mid 2014. Both STM32L0 Nucleo board and Discovery-kit feature an ST-Link/V2 hardware debugger.

Optimized sample-code snippets dedicated to STM32L0 MCUs will also be available for both the Nucleo board and Discovery kit, providing further help for designers seeking the lowest power-consumption profile. Priced from $0.93 for high volume orders, the new STM32L0 microcontrollers are offered in various package options from 2.7mm x 2.7mm WLCSP36 to 10mm x 10mm LQFP64, and with up to 64KByte of Flash, 8KByte of SRAM, and 2KByte of EEPROM.