Geneva, February 20, 2014 – STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, and a leader in ARM® Cortex®-M-core based microcontrollers, is introducingSTM32CubeTM, a powerful new free design tool and software for its STM32 microcontroller portfolio. This new development platform, which simplifies and accelerates customers’ projects, is set to further enhance the position of STM32 as the go-to microcontroller family for innovative electronic designers.
The new STM32Cube™ development platform comprises the STM32CubeMX graphical configurator and initialization C-code generator that provides step-by-step guidance for users and a set of rich embedded-software components that save integrating software from multiple sources. The software includes a new Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that simplifies porting from one STM32 device to another. By gathering all the generic software components needed for developing applications on STM32 microcontrollers into one single package, this platform eliminates the complex task of assessing dependencies between individual software components. STM32Cube provides hundreds of usage examples and an update mechanism for fast and efficient access to the latest versions of the software.
“STM32Cube allows engineers to take maximum advantage of our large STM32 portfolio, which now extends to over 360 microcontrollers, offering extensive hardware and software compatibility spanning a wide range of performance, power, and features,” said Michel Buffa, General Manager, Microcontroller Division, STMicroelectronics. “Today we are announcing the graphical configuration tool, with the middleware and HAL supporting high-performance STM32 F4 devices. Further releases will roll out during 2014, extending support to all STM32 devices.”
[1] A collaborative industry project, ARM mbed™ delivers free tools and fundamental open-source hardware and software building blocks for the rapid development of innovative ARM-based devices.
Further Technical Information:
The STM32CubeMX graphical configuration tool simplifies and automates configuration and generation of STM32 initialization C code ready to be used with several development environments. STM32CubeMX is also available as an Eclipse plug-in, allowing use within Eclipse-based development environments. The tool provides an easy-to-use filter for selecting the desired STM32 device and graphical wizards to simplify configuration: the pin-out wizard assists pin assignment to avoid conflicts, embedding a powerful constraints solver; the clock-tree wizard assigns clocks and performs dynamic validation; the peripherals-and-middleware wizard aids configuration to avoid unusable settings; and the power-consumption wizard checks that the application meets the available power budget.
The new HAL, part of the STM32CubeF4 embedded software, offers a high abstraction level, hence simplifying the porting of an application from one STM32 microcontroller to another. Features include support for re-entrant APIs allowing use with an RTOS, extra function calls allowing developers to target specific peripheral features and thereby leverage the rich functionality of STM32 microcontrollers, and support for polling, interrupt, and DMA (Direct Memory Access) programming models. The HAL uses the industry-standard CodeSonar® static-analysis tool, which helps ensure safe and predictable behavior of customer applications, and is distributed under a non-restrictive BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) open-source license.
The STM32CubeF4 middleware, part of STM32CubeF4 embedded software, also announced today for STM32 F4 series microcontrollers includes a TCP/IP stack, a full USB Host and Device stack supporting multiple classes, the STemWin professional graphics stack developed by ST with SEGGER, the FatFS open-source file system, and the FreeRTOS open-source real-time operating system, coming with optional CMSIS-RTOS programming interface. The middleware components have user-friendly license terms, either as open-source software or software delivered and supported by ST.
The STM32CubeMX tool and STM32CubeF4 embedded software are available immediately, free of charge, directly fromhttp://www.st.com/stm32cube. A large number of application-level demonstrations are available, illustrating how to use components of the HAL and middleware, targeting IAR™, Keil™ and GCC compilers. These can be run directly on the wide variety of STM32 F4 prototyping boards available from ST, which include ST evaluation boards, Discovery boards, and the newextendable Nucleo boards, which are mbed™[1]-enabled, feature Arduino connectivity, and are currently rolling out to support the entire STM32 family.
About STMicroelectronics
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