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STMicroelectronics have announced a new family of ultra-low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) with an emphasis on security to assure better protected IoT-connected applications. STMicroelectronics are one of the market leaders for MCUs used in strategic areas such as Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, and Smart Industry, they have identified the need for a series of MCUs that combine world-class ultra-low-power consumption along with industry-leading security and data protection meeting the demand from mission-critical applications and at-the-edge node processing typically required for Industrial IoT, energy metering, health (human or machine) monitoring and mobile point-of-sale applications.

The STM32L5x2 MCU family operates at clock frequencies up to 110MHz and is based on the Arm® Cortex®-M33 32-bit RISC core with Arm TrustZone® hardware-based security. First conceived for equipment such as desktops, mobile devices, and communication infrastructure, trusted computing has also become very important for devices connected to the IoT and IIot to protect against external attacks or hacking. TrustZone allows the secure authentication of devices connected to a network by creating a protected execution environment for cyber-protection and sensitive code (cryptography and key storage) that blocks attempts to corrupt devices or software. A second, independent, execution environment also allows for the running of untrusted code.

STMicroelectronics have added users the freedom to include or exclude each I/O, peripheral, or area of Flash or SRAM from TrustZone protection, allowing sensitive workloads to be fully isolated for maximum security. In addition the TrustZone has been engineered to ensure support for secure boot, special read-out and write protection for integrated SRAM and Flash, and cryptographic acceleration, including AES 128/256-bit key hardware acceleration, public key acceleration (PKA), and AES-128 On-The-Fly Decryption (OTFDEC), to protect external code or data. The STM32L5 also supports active tamper detection and secure firmware installation. With this attention to security, the STM32L5 has been certified to PSA Certified Level 2.

On top of the secure protection and design flexibility, the STM32L5x2 family adds STMicroelectronics proprietary best-in-class power management for energy-conscious applications, this ultra-low-power expertise offers techniques like adaptive voltage scaling, real-time acceleration, power gating, and multiple reduced-power operating modes, this enables the MCUs to deliver high performance and long run-times, whether powered by coin cells or even through energy harvesting. In addition, a highly efficient switched-mode step-down regulator can be powered up or down on-the-fly to improve low-power performance when the VDD voltage is high enough. The resulting ULPMark scores, which are key measures of ultra-low-power efficiency based on real-world benchmarks developed by EEMBC, are excellent: 370 ULPMark-CoreProfile and 54 ULPMark-Peripheral Profile at 1.8V.

Click below for an overview of the STM32L5 MCU family key features

The STM32L5x2 MCU family offers up to 512 Kbyte dual-bank Flash that allows read-while-write operation to aid device management and the Flash ensures a high level of safety by supporting Error Correction Code (ECC) with diagnostics. The MCUs also have 256Kbyte of onboard SRAM and feature support for high-speed external memory including single, dual, quad, or octal SPI and Hyperbus Flash or SRAM, and an interface for SRAM, PSRAM, NOR, NAND or FRAM.

Digital peripherals for the STM32L5x2 include USB Full Speed with dedicated supply, allowing the device to keep USB communication even when the system is powered at 1.8V, and a UCPD controller compliant with USB Type-C Rev. 1.2 and USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 specifications. Smart analog features include a state-of-the-art analog-to-digital converter (ADC), two power-gated digital-to-analog converters (DAC), two ultra-low-power comparators, and two operational amplifiers with external or internal follower routing and programmable-gain amplifier (PGA) capability.

Support tools

As part of the industry-leading STM32 family of MCUs, the STM32L5 series is fully supported by the STM32 ecosystem allowing engineers to evaluate the full feature set of the MCUs and speed up time to market. The STM32L5 series has its own dedicated STM32CubeL5 one-stop-shop software package, this includes Hardware Abstraction Layer and Low-Level drivers, FreeRTOS, Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M), Secure Boot and Secure Firmware Update (SBSFU), USB-PD device driver, MbedTLS and MbedCrypto, FatFS file system, and Touch Sensing drivers. In addition, the STM32CubeL5 features more than 300 project examples that can run on the STM32L562E-DK discovery kit, and NUCLEO-L552ZE-Q. These projects can be compiled with the Arm Keil® development tool, IAR or STM32CubeIDE toolchains, and are delivered with a STM32CubeMX configuration file, enabling easy customization and code update.

The STM32L5x2 MCUs are available in 7 package options (LQFP48, QFN48, LQFP64, WLCSP81, LQFP100, UFBGA132 and LQFP144) with standard temperature grade of -40°C to +85°C suitable for consumer and commercial applications, a further high-temperature grade option is available for operation from -40°C to +125°C for more challenging environments.

Anglia are offering customers a FREE Evaluation board for the STM32L5x2 ultra-low-power, secure microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics, please fill in the form below to register your interest now.