Exploring the Future of Wireless Microcontrollers with STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics has unveiled its latest breakthrough in semiconductor technology with the introduction of high-performance wireless microcontrollers, poised to revolutionize the landscape of smart industrial, medical, and consumer devices. With a focus on seamless integration, security, and support for multiple wireless standards including Bluetooth® LE, Zigbee®, and Thread, these state-of-the-art microcontrollers cater to the evolving needs of the market. STMicroelectronics new STM32WBA5 product line not only streamlines the development process for wearables, smart home devices, and health monitors but also sets a new standard for compactness, affordability, and regulatory compliance.

During an interaction, Mohit Arora, GPM Wireless Marketing Manager, APeC Region, STMicroelectronics discussed the advancements in wireless microcontroller technology, particularly ST’s STM32WBA5 product line, enabling efficient and innovative solutions for diverse smart devices in various sectors such as smart home, IoT, gaming peripherals, and asset tracking.

1. What developments are going for Microcontrollers technology? Which trends are causing these developments? How is ST leveraging the same?

We invest heavily in research and development to incorporate the latest technologies and features. Among the many areas in which we innovate there are three of particular focus: security, connectivity and increasing autonomy enabled by edge AI. This includes building more advanced hardware solutions, integrating software and creating ecosystems that enable developers to go further, faster.

Developing ultra-low power MCUs are also key for building energy-efficient applications, supporting customer’s sustainability ambitions. STMicroelectronics has been a leader in ultralow power MCUs for many years. Today we offer a wide range of microcontrollers with extremely low power consumption, ideal for battery-powered and energy-efficient applications, including now a new entry-level, ultra-low-power microcontroller series, STM32U0. This product sets new benchmarks for ultralow power performance and cost efficiency.

2. What are the key benefits with STM32WBA55 architecture for battery powered applications?

STM32WBA5 is a full family with several members meaning that by construction it gives flexibility to designers. This can be achieved on multiple different angles:

There are three key advantages with STM32WBA for battery powered applications:

• Its based on the 40nm process node which is much efficient being a smaller process node consuming low power.
• Our architecture offers fast transition of device within the low power modes to the active modes saving transition state energy.
• We offer a very flexible architecture where you operate SMPS even in STOP mode, you can dynamically switch between SMPS and LDO and the clock can be scaled from 16 MHz to the max 100MHz dynamically with the configurable supply output from both SMPS and LDO. With this flexibility, the system designers getthe leverage to operate the device in the best possible scenario which can help designers save the most power by switching to the best scenario basis the current application execution state.

3. How does the STM32WBA55 line address the challenges associated with supporting multiple wireless protocols such as Bluetooth®️ Low Energy 5.4, IEEE 802.15.4, Zigbee®️, Thread, and Matter, particularly in terms of interoperability, power management, security implementation, and protocol standardization?

STM32WBA family is supporting LE Audio technology which more focused on low power consumption devices, targeting to provide better audio quality, and audio features (Audio Profile Unicast and Auracast) and therefore subsequently Auracast which is a feature of LE Audio.

For LE Broadcasting, we could see smaller devices like earbuds, headphones and speaker could be implemented with the technology with respect to the growth from Broadcast sources like smartphone, TV and location-based announcement.

Source devices will continue to support Bluetooth Classic Audio and LE Audio via dual-mode chipsets for the foreseeable future. This will enable them to take advantage of new LE Audio and Auracast™ broadcast audio use cases while ensuring compatibility with the existing ecosystem of Bluetooth Classic Audio devices on the market today. Sink devices will increasingly support standalone LE Audio solutions as the installed base of LE Audio devices continues to grow.