About UsST Adds New STM32WB Bluetooth Microcontrollers to its STM32 Range
These dual core Arm® processors provide a separate processor for the main application and for the Bluetooth Communication
STMicroelectronics has extended its STM32WB* Bluetooth® LE microcontroller (MCU) offering with new devices that combine entry-level features with extra power savings for longer-lasting performance.
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The dual-core STM32WB15 and STM32WB10 Value Line pair an Arm® Cortex®-M4 processor to run the main application and a Cortex-M0+ to handle Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, ensuring real-time performance from each. The radio stage has a 102dBm link budget to ensure reliable connections over long distances and integrates balun circuitry to save board space and reduce the bill of materials.
With a new ultra-power-saving mode that allows the radio to remain operational, and carefully tailored peripherals and memory, the new devices are suited to cost-sensitive, power-conscious embedded applications including wearables, beacons, smart circuit breakers, trackers, IoT endpoints, and equipment for industrial automation.
The Software Development Kit (SDK) for each MCU includes standardized radio protocol stacks and openness to proprietary protocols with a set of security mechanisms that ensure safe software updates for brand protection and device integrity, with Proprietary Code Read-Out Protection (PCROP) to guard intellectual property.
With these new devices, the STM32WB series scales across package variants, offering options including extended GPIOs and pin-to-pin compatibility between similar packages of the portfolio. Customers can easily migrate designs between devices to take advantage of different features and memory densities, leveraging pin-compatibility across packages.
The development ecosystem includes STM32Cube certified radio stacks that support various profiles, software expansion packs and sample code, the STM32CubeMX configurator and initialization code generator, the STM32CubeIDE development environment, a powerful STM32CubeMonitor-RF evaluation tool, and associated Nucleo hardware tools.
Features of the STM32WB15CC Arm® Cortex®-M4 Microcontroller with 320Kb Flash Memory and Bluetooth include:
- Radio
- 2.4 GHz
- RF transceiver supporting Bluetooth® 5.2 specification
- RX sensitivity: -95.5 dBm (Bluetooth® Low Energy at 1 Mbps)
- Programmable output power up to +5.5 dBm with 1 dB steps
- Integrated balun to reduce BOM
- Support for 2 Mbps
- Dedicated Arm® 32-bit Cortex® M0+ CPU for real-time Radio layer
- Accurate RSSI to enable power control
- Suitable for systems requiring compliance with radio frequency regulations ETSI EN 300 328, EN 300 440, FCC CFR47 Part 15 and ARIB STD-T66
- Ultra-low-power platform
- 1.71 to 3.6 V power supply
- – 40 °C to 85 / 105 °C temperature ranges
- 12 nA shutdown mode
- 610 nA Standby mode + RTC + 48 KB RAM
- Active-mode MCU: 33 µA / MHz when RF and SMPS on
- Radio: Rx 4.5 mA / Tx at 0 dBm 5.2 mA
- Core: Arm® 32-bit Cortex®-M4 CPU with FPU, frequency up to 64 MHz
- Performance benchmark - 1.25 DMIPS/MHz (Drystone 2.1)
- Supply and reset management
- High efficiency embedded SMPS step-down converter with intelligent bypass mode
- Ultra-safe, low-power BOR (brownout reset) with five selectable thresholds
- Ultra-low-power POR/PDR
- Programmable voltage detector (PVD)
- VBAT mode with RTC and backup registers
- Clock Sources
- 32 MHz crystal oscillator
- 32 kHz crystal oscillator for RTC
- Internal low-power 32 kHz RC
- Internal multispeed 100 kHz to 48 MHz oscillator, factory-trimmed
- High speed internal 16 MHz factory trimmed RC
- 1 x PLL for system clock and ADC
- Memories
- 320 KB Flash memory with sector protection
- 48 KB SRAM, including 36 KB with hardware parity check
- 20x32-bit backup register
- Boot loader supporting USART, SPI, I2C interfaces
- 1 Kbyte (128 double words) OTP
- Rich analog peripherals (down to 1.62 V)
- 12-bit ADC 2.5 Msps, 190 µA/Msps
- 1 x ultra-low-power comparator
- System peripherals
- Inter processor communication controller (IPCC) for communication with Bluetooth® Low Energy
- HW semaphores for resources sharing between CPUs
- 1 x DMA controller (7x channels) supporting ADC, SPI, I2C, USART, AES, timers
- 1 x USART (ISO 7816, IrDA, SPI Master, Modbus and Smartcard mode)
- 1 x LPUART (low power)
- 1 x SPI 32 Mbit/s
- 1 x I2C (SMBus/PMBus)
- Touch sensing controller, up to eight sensors
- 1 x 16-bit, four channels advanced timer
- 1 x 32-bit, four channels timer
- 2 x 16-bit ultra-low-power timer
- 1 x independent Systick
- 1 x independent watchdog
- 1 x window watchdog
- Security and identification
- Secure firmware installation (SFI) for Bluetooth® Low Energy SW stack
- 2 x hardware encryption AES maximum 256-bit for the application and the Bluetooth® Low Energy
- HW public key authority
- Cryptographic algorithms: RSA, Diffie-Helman, ECC over GF(p)
- True random number generator
- Sector protection against R/W operation
- CRC calculation unit
- Die information: 96-bit unique ID
- IEEE 64-bit unique ID. Possibility to derive Bluetooth® Low Energy 48-bit EUI
- Up to 37 fast I/Os, 35 of them 5 V-tolerant
- Development support
- Serial wire debug (SWD), JTAG for the application processor
- Application cross trigger
More information on the STM32WB15CC Arm® Cortex®-M4 Microcontroller is available on the ST website at STMicroelectronics STM32WB15CC product page.
*STM32 are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of STMicroelectronics International NV or its affiliates in the EU and/or elsewhere.
In particular, STM32 is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The STMicroelectronics website address is www.st.com
[Reprinted with kind permission from STMicroelectronics - Release Date, 10th March, 2021]