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STMicroelectronics has announced its new STM32 Bluetooth wireless module, intended to help designers leverage ST’s dual-core STM32WB microcontrollers (MCUs) with projects involving low to medium production volumes. The module combines Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.3 certification and worldwide radio equipment approvals with the STM32Cube ecosystem support, the company reports.
The STM32WB1MMC module is built to reduce supply chain obstacles and lead-time issues, according to ST, and to help users avoid certification costs and delays. It includes a full reference design in an LGA package, with an internal antenna and a matching network, as well as pins for attaching an external antenna instead of the internal one if needed. RF performance up to 6 dBm output power and -96 dBm sensitivity, with improved signal routing, enables reliable communication over long distances at data rates of up to two megabits per second, the company reports. A switched-mode power supply for the subsystem is also built in.
The module is designed around the STM32WB15 MCU, with 320 KB flash and 48 KB RAM. The MCU’s dual-core architecture, comprising Arm Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4 cores, offers real-time performance for the radio subsystem (from the M0+) and the user application (running on the M4). The provided Bluetooth 5.3 stack and profiles support advertising extensions and other capabilities. The MCU features flexible power-management modes, including standby and stop2, allowing self-powered devices to operate without intervention for extended periods. The module allows access to all STM32WB15 features, the company notes, which include a 12-bit analog-digital converter and various digital interfaces.
As with the STM32WB5MMG module, which contains larger flash and SRAM, the STM32WB1MMC and its supporting B-WB1M-WPAN1 evaluation board are integrated within the STM32Cube environment, facilitating software development. The STM32CubeWB MCU package provides resources including hardware abstraction layer firmware, low-layer APIs, a file system and RTOS. Sharing this package with other STM32WB MCUs allows direct porting of existing projects to the module, ST explains, boosting flexibility and accelerating project completion. The STM32WB1MMC modules are now in production and are priced at $5.32 apiece for orders of 10,000 units.
In other news, technology solutions provider Avnet, an STMicroelectronics authorized partner, has announce the availability of IoTConnect on the STM32U5 microcontroller. This pre-integrated, fully supported platform is designed to provide a production-ready, scalable solution for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) deploying cloud-connected Internet of Things (IoT) applications in high volumes. IoTConnect on STM32U5 provides pre-enablement across hardware and software, the companies report, and Avnet’s accelerator software includes dashboards and templates that can be configured to match an OEM’s application across multiple vertical markets.
“Adding support for Avnet’s IoTConnect can be of great benefit to our customers developing applications using the STM32U5,” said Daniel Colonna, STMicroelectronics’ STM32 marketing director, in a prepared statement. “Avnet created and industrialized the tool to support scalable deployment, making it ideal for large-volume IoT applications.” Avnet developed IoTConnect to work with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, and it features secure device management (SDM).
Using a software development kit co-developed with STMicroelectronics, OEMs can implement SDM in IoTConnect on STM32U5 with minimal design effort, the companies indicate. IoTConnect can run on the STM32U5 Discovery Kit, which comes with multiple sensors, including temperature, humidity, pressure, time-of-flight and gesture recognition. This data is acquired and securely communicated to a cloud platform, and the dashboard displays the information and interacts with the Discovery Kit remotely.