"There is no doubt about the status of Italian French semiconductor (hereinafter referred to as st) in the field of MCU.
According to the statistics of IHS, in 2018, the global shipment of St MCU (excluding automobile and safety MCU) ranked second in the world. Its general motors plus MCU shipments in China ranks first, ahead of NXP, which ranks second.
STM 32 shipments in the last nine years
Especially the shipment of STM32 MCU is amazing. According to IHS statistics, in the past four years, the average compound annual growth rate of STM32 was as high as 30%. Last year, the company's STM32 shipment reached 1.2 billion. According to the statistics from 2007 to now, the company's STM32 shipments exceed 4 billion pieces and serves more than 40000 customers. This achievement is mainly due to the company's investment in products and technology over the years.
At the "STM32 China Summit" recently held in Shenzhen, Ricardo de SA Earp, vice president of Italian French semiconductor microcontroller and digital IC (MDG) products department and general manager of microcontroller business department, said that since the launch of the world's first Cortex-M MCU in 2007, the company has launched 14 series of STM32 products, The company has also consolidated its position step by step in this development process.
STM 32 14 series to date
However, with the development of technology and the rise of applications such as artificial intelligence and Internet of things, the market puts forward new requirements for MCU, and ST is also facing new challenges. Under this new trend, Daniel Colonna, global marketing director of the company's microcontroller division, revealed the future development direction of STM32 at the "STM32 China Summit" a few days ago. According to Daniel Colonna, STM32 series processors will develop in six directions in the future: more price friendly (STM32 G0 Series), safer, more hardware accelerators and analog peripherals, higher energy efficiency ratio and low power consumption, more radio frequency (stm32wb) and stronger computing performance (STM32 H7 and STM MP1).
Six directions for future development of STM 32
First, the price is more people-friendly;
Daniel Colonna said that STM 32 G0 series of STM are 28-64 pin products, but the company will promote the product to 20 pin package in the next step, so that it has 18 I / O pins. The company's next goal is to promote products with eight pin package, 32KB flash memory, 8KB ram, up to 6 I / O pins and 1% precision internal clock.
Secondly, in terms of security, stm21 series from the previous sbsfu library and SFI security installation program, to the enhanced IP isolation and trusted tf-m firmware, to the enhanced encryption and key function and hardware DPA attack protection, Italian semiconductor is gradually consolidating the security of STM32 and escorting applications such as the Internet of things.
In terms of high-performance analog peripherals, St plans to bring algorithm accelerator, more advanced comparator (16.7ns propagation delay), high-performance operational amplifier (13mhz gain bandwidth, 45V / US slew rate), more advanced ADC (4 MSPs, 7.5 MSPs interleaved) and dual sector flash memory to its STM32 G4 series. In addition, on its x cube mcsdk 5.4, STMicroelectronics also plans to bring various support to it.
STM 32 high performance analog peripherals and algorithm accelerator
As for hardware acceleration, Daniel Colonna pointed out that the goal of STMicroelectronics is to enable most STM32 products to support AI in-depth learning, and STM 32 cube AI plays a very important role in their plan.
Statistics show that stm32cube is a set of powerful free development tools and embedded software modules provided by St, which can enable developers to develop applications quickly and easily on STM32 platform. It consists of two key parts: graphical configuration tool (stm32cubemx) - allows users to generate C language projects through graphical wizards; Embedded software package (stm32cube Library) - contains a complete Hal Library (STM32 hardware abstraction layer API), supporting middleware (including RTOS, USB, TCP / IP and graphics), and a series of complete routines.
STM 32 cube AI is a new STM 32 cube MX extension, which can bring the budget trained artificial neural network to the STM32 application, and bring the AI to the edge through the low-power MCU to approach the sensor.
According to the official information of stm32cube.ai, stm32cube.ai comes with a ready to use software function package, which includes code examples for identifying human activities and audio scene classification. These code examples can be used immediately on the St sensortile reference board and the st ble sensor mobile app mobile application. The st partner program and the dedicated community for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Qualified partners within the STM32 online community will provide technical support to developers, such as engineering services. Developers can use stm32cube.ai to convert the pre trained neural network into C code that can run on STM32 microcontroller and call the optimized function library.
Next step plan of stm32cube.ai
It is reported that stm32cube.ai now supports mass market and floating-point computing. In the future IOT nodes, St wants to bring support for quantization, MCU tensor flow and more software layers. In terms of function package, St also plans to evolve from handwriting and perception to maintenance, vision and voice examples in the future. These functions, together with the AI special program of St partners and STM32 online community, can quickly promote AI to the edge.
Future AI examples
In addition, STMicroelectronics also plans to accelerate 2D graphics through the newly acquired touchgfx.
It is reported that touchgfx is a very advanced and optimized microcontroller graphical user interface solution, which can provide excellent graphics processing performance and smooth animation effect for embedded graphical user interface (GUI). At the same time, it has very low demand for resources and power consumption. Running it on a 32-bit microcontroller can achieve high-end graphics processing performance completely comparable to today's smart phone standards. It is suitable for smart home and building automation systems, home appliances, wearable devices, audio and video systems and other devices and systems. St also plans to push it to the full series of STM32.
Support the full range of graphical interface design of STM32
In order to achieve stronger computing performance, STMicroelectronics has launched STM32 H7 with a frequency of more than 500MHz and stm32mp1 MPU based on cortex-a and supporting Linux.
According to the introduction of STMicroelectronics, the company will embed 280mhz high-performance cortex-m7, built-in high-capacity 2MB flash memory, 1.4MB SRAM and built-in display interface in the next generation H7, with the number of pins as few as 64-100, dynamic security encryption and decryption of off chip SPI memory, and make its power consumption reach 160 µ A / MHz under the operation mode of 280mhz, while in stop2 mode, The power consumption of full ram operation is only 34 µ a.
Next generation H7
The stm32mp1 Microprocessor Family (MPU), which integrates two different cores of arm cortex-a and Cortex-M, can bring customers support of heterogeneous computing architecture. This flexible heterogeneous computing architecture can always achieve the highest energy efficiency by performing fast data processing and real-time tasks on a single chip. In addition, stm32mp1 is embedded with 3D graphics processor (GPU) to support man-machine interface (HMI) display; External memory supports various DDR SDRAM and flash memory. In addition, stm32mp1 embeds a large number of peripherals and can be seamlessly assigned to cortex-a / Linux or Cortex-M / real-time operation. Stm32mp1 series adopts a variety of BGA packages, supports the lowest cost PCB structure, and occupies very little circuit board space. This combines energy-efficient real-time control and high functional integration, which helps to simplify the development of high-performance solutions for industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, smart home and medical applications.
Dual benefits of STM 32 MP1 dual core
Come to more wireless aspects; In order to meet the needs of different standard iots in the future, STMicroelectronics plans to bring ble, 802.15.4 and Lora integration support for its STM 32. The STM32 WL, which integrates STM 32 L4 with Lora RF, is a typical example.
Long distance Sub-1GHz RF stm32
In addition, the company has previously released a dual core wireless communication chip stm32wb product, which integrates an open 2.4G RF multi protocol module and supports Bluetooth 5.0, thread and ZigBee protocol stacks. Support multi protocol and RF development, ble 5.0 protocol stack, double the data rate, support 2Mbps high-speed mode, support ble mesh technology and improve network coverage; Support the latest IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless communication standard, openthread protocol stack, and run ble and openthread simultaneously in dynamic and static mode; Support proprietary protocol stack (such as ble or 802.15.4), the best RF transceiver of the same kind, with output power up to + 6dbm and RF link budget of 102dB; The receiving power consumption is only 3.8ma and the transmitting power consumption is 5.5ma (@ 0dbm), which is suitable for energy sensitive applications; Integrated balun balun balancer to reduce BOM cost.
These wireless products are bound to enhance the influence of STMicroelectronics in the Internet of things market.
Multi product line strategy of St MCU
From the st summit, we can also see that in addition to its STM 32 products, the company also has a good performance in stm8 and sensor products. Especially in the sensor, STMicroelectronics also innovatively introduces the machine learning core, so that the related work of artificial intelligence can be completed on the sensor hardware. Compared with the application processor, it can save 10 to 1000 times of power consumption, which brings more possibilities for future terminal applications.
20 year history of St sensor
In addition, the company also has analog, industrial power conversion ICs, automotive special ICs, professional image sensors, discrete devices and power transistors, and ASIC chips based on St patented technology. Based on these high-performance products, they have established close cooperative relations with Alibaba cloud, China Mobile, Shanghai Qingke, RT thread and other enterprises, which can provide more support for the industry, The company has also made great profits in this process.
Some partners of St
The financial report shows that the revenue of Italian French semiconductor in 2018 was US $9.664 billion, an increase of 15.8% compared with 2017; Gross profit also reached US $38.61, a year-on-year increase of 18%; The net profit soared by 60.4% from 200 million in the previous year to 1.287 billion yuan in 2018. Although entering the first quarter of this year, under the dual influence of the global trade environment and the terminal market, the company's revenue, gross profit, operating profit and net profit all decreased.
However, Jean Marc Chery, President and CEO of Italian French semiconductor, said that it is expected that the company's revenue in the second quarter will resume month on month growth, the sales revenue of industrial, automotive and personal electronic terminal markets will also increase strongly in the second half of the year, and the company's annual net revenue will return to between us $9.45 billion and US $9.85 billion in 2019.
Of course, MCU will play a very important role in it.
(source: WeChat official account "semiconductor industry observation")
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