10 June 2008

UK: Workshop Overview Of STM32 MCU & ARM Cortex-M3

RS Components is to host a free customer workshop this month at its centre in Oxford, UK to introduce the STM32 microcontroller system architecture from STMicroelectronics and ARM’s Cortex-M3 Macrocell.

The course which is being held at Electrocomponents International Management Centre in Oxford, is targeted at design engineers.

Each section of the workshop will be accompanied by hands-on exercises using the industry leading MDK-ARM toolset from Keil. Engineers will move through the creation of a project to handling features, such as the Cortex interrupt structure, the STM32 DMA and peripherals. More advanced topics, like using a real-time operating system, will also be covered.

The STM32 device consumes only 36mA, making it well suited for battery-operated applications, operating from a 2.0V to 3.6V power supply drawing just 2µA in standby mode. The microcontroller provides designers with the ability to reduce code size by 45%, via the use of the Thumb 2 instruction set. The device is particularly well-suited for use in portable applications, where low power consumption is important, but it can also be used in traditional applications.

The Cortex-M3 is based on ARMv7-M architecture on a 3-stage pipeline able to deliver 1.25 DMIPS/MHz. It combines the Thumb2 instruction set with unaligned data & storage and atomic bit manipulation. The integrated Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC) offers deterministic, low latency interrupt handling through tail-chaining technology and can be configured for up to 240 interrupts. For safe operation in industrial control applications, the optional Memory Protection Unit (MPU) enables secure operation through privileged access modes and the separation of processes in an application. The Flash Patch and Breakpoint (FPB) unit, Data Watchpoint and Trace (DWT) unit, Instrumentation Trace Macrocell (ITM) and the optional Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM) offer low-cost debug and trace capabilities. Extensive clock gating technology and integrated sleep modes enable low power designs.