"After reducing the 32-bit MCU stm32f030 series to 32 cents in 2013, St recently offered a minimum price of 29 cents for its latest Cortex-M0 + stm32l0 series microcontroller. James wiart, director of microcontroller market and application in St Greater China and Asia Pacific, once again denied the saying of "price war", saying that "this is a requirement from the market and customers. St hopes to pass on the characteristics of ultra-low power consumption, few pins and low price to the market. " In addition, ST's high-profile announcement to enter the field of low-power wide area network (lpwan) by supporting Lora protocol also attracted considerable attention.
Low power Wan became a hot pastry overnight
Recent research by Machina research, a strategic market intelligence provider in the field of Internet of things, shows that by the end of 2015, the number of low-power wide area network (lpwan) access devices had tripled worldwide, reaching 23.2 million. Aapo markkanen, chief analyst of the company, said that in 2016, the competition of deploying lpwan will continue all the way. Lpwan is becoming the best weapon to make up for the short board of Internet of things network layer and M2M connection.
At present, in the field of dedicated low-power Wan, most attention is still focused on sigfox and Lora. Sigfox was founded five years ago to build a low-cost wireless Internet of things private network with low attack consumption. Following the financing of € 100 million from several heavyweight investors in early 2015, the French startup sigfox plans to build a new global network. At present, sigfox's network covers 10 major cities in France, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK, and plans to deploy the Internet of things in 10 major cities in the United States by April 2016.
Lora has the characteristics of high sensitivity, low power consumption, high penetration and strong reliability. It can be used in the fields of wireless AMR, Internet of things sensors, smoke detection, gas detection, traffic and access control. At present, at least nine operators (including orange) have announced plans to deploy Lora network. Among them, Tata communications, the latest operator, announced in November 2015 that it would deploy Lora network throughout India. As the first low-power Wan alliance, Lora alliance has reached 130 members six months after its establishment, covering chips, modules, software developers, OEM manufacturers and operators.
St development board recommendation:
NUCLEO-F042K6 A 32-bit RISC core with high-performance armcortex-m0, working frequency of up to 48 MHz and development board of high-speed embedded memory
Srk2001 evaluation board It is used to demonstrate the performance of srk2001 synchronous rectifier controller. The operation of its device is based on adaptive algorithm, which can realize the on and off of SR MOSFET.
32f746gdiscovery discovery Kit A development board based on cortex-m7 core, which supports audio video recorder and home anti-theft newspaper such as audio and video player.
Hakim Jaafar, marketing manager of St STM32 ultra-low power consumption and network microcontroller, said that in the past, there were indeed many chips based on sub GHz wireless carrier protocol, but most of them were difficult to meet the market demand because the protocol stack was too large, the chip technology was old, and the power consumption cost was too high to meet the modular applications powered by batteries. However, the advantages of Lora are: first, the protocol stack is exquisite, only 32K; Second, Lora suppliers, such as Semtech, have adopted newer processes to make their costs better and lower; Third, the transmission distance is longer. Therefore, ST is very optimistic about the development prospect of Lora and has increased its investment in this field.
Hakim Jaafar, marketing manager of St STM32 ultra low power and Network Microcontroller
In December 2015, St signed a Semtech Lora long-distance radio frequency communication technology cooperation agreement with Semtech, preparing to use Lora technology to increase the market share of STM32 microcontroller and enter the Internet of things and large-scale private network market of mobile operators.
However, different from the integrated SOC scheme adopted by peers, St currently adopts the separate architecture of STM32 + Semtech RF. Hakim Jaafar explained that SOC products will certainly appear in the company's product roadmap in the future, but not now, because the separation scheme is more flexible“ To enter an emerging market, we must first deeply understand the real needs of customers and rashly define an SOC at the beginning, which is very risky. "
At the same time, compared with the scene seen six months ago, the mobile industry has obviously shown a greater sense of urgency recently, and has made articles around the 3GPP standard. According to the report of Machina research, at present, the connection between objects really carried on the mobile communication network accounts for only 6% of the total connections. Such a low proportion is a scene that the mobile communication industry does not want to see. Although some details have not been completely solved, it is expected that 3GPP's standardization of nb-iot will be frozen by March 2016. With the completion of the standardization process, nb-iot technology will move towards large-scale commercial use.
St development board recommendation:
NUCLEO-F042K6 A 32-bit RISC core with high-performance armcortex-m0, working frequency of up to 48 MHz and development board of high-speed embedded memory
Srk2001 evaluation board It is used to demonstrate the performance of srk2001 synchronous rectifier controller. The operation of its device is based on adaptive algorithm, which can realize the on and off of SR MOSFET.
32f746gdiscovery discovery Kit A development board based on cortex-m7 core, which supports audio video recorder and home anti-theft newspaper such as audio and video player.
At this year's mwc2016, Ericsson demonstrated low-power wide area (lpwa) cellular IOT solutions, including narrowband Internet of things (NB IOT), lte-m (cat m) and ec-egprs / ec-gsm for large-scale IOT applications. Huawei hopes that its NB IOT solution can not only help operators' home broadband service digital transformation and realize smart home, but also create a ubiquitous cellular Internet of things for operators and open new business opportunities in fields such as intelligent meter reading, intelligent parking, logistics tracking and smart city. Huawei Hisilicon will launch NB IOT commercial chip at the end of September this year, which will be the first officially commercial NB IOT chip in the industry.
However, from the perspective of the traditional Internet of things industry, Nb IOT is not suitable for most Internet of things use scenarios. Its opportunity is in applications requiring large network coverage such as the Internet of vehicles, rather than the traditional Internet of things. Because most Internet of things scenarios such as smart door locks and data monitoring do not need real-time wireless networking, they can be completed only by near-field communication or wired. On the other hand, cost, price and power consumption will also become obstacles to the development of Nb IOT. In terms of cost, the cost of Nb IOT module is expected to be reduced to less than $5 in the future, but at present, the price of chips supporting Bluetooth, thread and ZigBee is only about $2, and the price of chips supporting only one standard is less than $1. The huge price gap will undoubtedly make enterprises worry about deploying NB IOT.
However, Gartner has a different view. Although the company predicts that low-power Wan will become one of the top ten Internet of things technologies in 2017-2018, they point out that the first batch of lpwan may still be built according to proprietary technologies, but in the long run, Nb IOT and other emerging standards will become the mainstream in this field.
Power consumption? Let's run a minute
The new stm32l0 series has three product lines: stm32l0x1 basic product line, stm32l0x2 USB product line (no crystal USB2.0 full speed) and stm32l0x3 USB / LCD product line with integrated HMI module. The storage capacity ranges from 8KB to 192kb flash, 20KB SRAM and up to 6KB EEPROM. In addition, the new 14 pin package makes it the smallest STM32 microcontroller, allowing 32-bit performance into entry-level embedded applications.
As a microcontroller for energy sensitive applications such as wearable devices, medical monitors, industrial sensors and intelligent living devices, stm32l0 scored 135 points in ulpmark-c certification test. With a DC converter, ulpmark-c scored 158.7 points. In addition, the stm32l0 series has the lowest power consumption and robustness of its kind at 125 ° C.
Ultra low power mode
St development board recommendation:
NUCLEO-F042K6 A 32-bit RISC core with high-performance armcortex-m0, working frequency of up to 48 MHz and development board of high-speed embedded memory
Srk2001 evaluation board It is used to demonstrate the performance of srk2001 synchronous rectifier controller. The operation of its device is based on adaptive algorithm, which can realize the on and off of SR MOSFET.
32f746gdiscovery discovery Kit A development board based on cortex-m7 core, which supports audio video recorder and home anti-theft newspaper such as audio and video player.
The main low-power peripherals of the new stm32l0 product include low-power ADC. When sampling at 12 bit resolution of 10000 times / s, the power consumption is only 41 μ A. And an ultra-low power consumption timer (16 bit timer), which can run in the ultra-low power consumption mode; The low power consumption mode includes stop mode. When all RAM data is reserved and Automatic wake-up can be realized, only 340na is consumed. Wake up from stop mode can realize fast wake-up, which only takes 3.5 minutes μ s。 The new series products also have an interconnection bus matrix, which allows the system to continue to process data when the CPU is standby, so as to improve the efficiency of the system.
Innovative digital capabilities
Rich simulation functions
Software development tools include stm32cubemx and stm32cubel0 middleware and firmware suite. Stm32cubemx initialization code generator and microcontroller configurator provide easy-to-use wizards, including power calculator, to help designers evaluate and fine tune power budget. Stm32subel0 includes a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to simplify porting applications between pin and code compatible STM32 products. In addition, stm32snippet provides optimized code examples. Stm32cube provides more than 200 free code examples. Stm32cube tools are all free, and St link debugger, dfuse and flash loader tools are also free to simplify the use and test of ROM boot program.
The nucleus-32 development board of onboard 32 pin MCU is used to evaluate 16kb to 32KB stm32l0 microcontroller, and the onboard 64 pin nucleus-64 development board is used to evaluate 64KB to 192kb stm32l0 microcontroller. These low-cost prototype boards enable users to start performance evaluation with little investment. STMicroelectronics also provides exploration kits, including ePaper displays and evaluation boards for integrated inductive sensing circuits. Each circuit board carries an ST link hardware debugger that can access all pins of the microcontroller and an Arduino compatible connector that facilitates the expansion of the functions of the motherboard. Arm mbed compatibility gives developers free access to mbed.org's online tools.
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St development board recommendation:
NUCLEO-F042K6 A 32-bit RISC core with high-performance armcortex-m0, working frequency of up to 48 MHz and development board of high-speed embedded memory
Srk2001 evaluation board It is used to demonstrate the performance of srk2001 synchronous rectifier controller. The operation of its device is based on adaptive algorithm, which can realize the on and off of SR MOSFET.
32f746gdiscovery discovery Kit A development board based on cortex-m7 core, which supports audio video recorder and home anti-theft newspaper such as audio and video player.
Related reading:
St releases a free Linux desktop development program for STM32 micro control unit
Dalian Youshang group launched the smallest microcontroller in St STM32 F4 series
Grand Alliance Youshang group launched advanced st new motion sensor
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