Wearable device business opportunities emerge, Cortex-M4 MCU demand surges

　　James Wiart, director of microcontroller marketing and applications for STMicroelectronics in Greater China and South Asia, said that thanks to the budding business opportunities in wearable devices, the demand for high-end MCU market is rising rapidly.

　　James Wiart, director of microcontroller marketing and applications for Greater China and South Asia at STMicroelectronics (ST), said that after smartphones and tablets, smart wearable devices are expected to become the fastest growing terminal products in terms of shipments in the future, thus attracting various MCU manufacturers to compete for this market. In order to meet the requirements of wearable device manufacturers for product performance, MCU manufacturers are constantly improving solutions based on the Cortex-M4 core, hoping to replace expensive digital signal processors (DSPs).

　　Wiart further pointed out that since most products such as smart watches, smart glasses or portable medical devices are equipped with LCD panels to present more complex or detailed images, if manufacturers use standard application processors or DSPs, not only will the component costs be higher, but the power consumption will also tend to rise sharply. Therefore, there is an urgent need for solutions that have high computing performance, low cost and low power consumption.

　　In view of this, STMicroelectronics has launched a new Cortex-M4 MCU - the STM32F4x9 series. This component highly integrates DSP and floating-point unit (FPU), and also has a TFT-LCD controller and an Adaptive Real-time (ART) accelerator to speed up graphics processing performance. It can provide a computing speed of up to 180MHz/225DMIPS, which can replace the current integrated solutions based on MCU and mid- and low-end DSPs, allowing developers to save circuit board space and reduce system design complexity.

　　In addition, the STM32F4x9 series has a maximum of 2MB flash memory or 1MB dual-zone flash memory, and each flash memory has built-in 256KB RAM, allowing embedded systems to use advanced platforms such as Microsoft.NET, Java or uC Linux. This design approach allows software designers to develop more feature-rich application software and provide a better user experience at a faster speed and higher efficiency.

　　It is worth noting that, thanks to STMicroelectronics’ 90nm process and new product design technology, the shutdown mode current of the STM32F429/39 series MCU can be reduced to 100 microamperes (µA), which is about one-third of the power consumption of the existing STM32F2 and STM32F4 series MCUs.

　　Wiart emphasized that many wearable device manufacturers have begun to introduce Cortex-M4 MCUs, which is expected to expand high-end MCUs from markets such as industrial control and defense aerospace to the consumer electronics market with huge business opportunities. STMicroelectronics will seize this application opportunity with the STM32F4x9 series MCUs.