According to reports, the STM32N6 includes a proprietary NPU and an ARM Cortex core. Remi El-Ouazzane, president of ST's Microcontrollers and Digital IC business unit, said this provides the same AI performance as quad-core processors with AI accelerators, but at one tenth the cost and 12 times the power consumption one.
The chip will be sampling by the end of 2022, he said. While there's no mention of the ARM cores that will be used, the performance and power figures point to ARM's M55 or even the latest core M85 that was recently released. The M85 is ARM's highest-performance M core, issuing up to 3 instructions per cycle and featuring an internal accelerator for AI to help boost performance.
ST is a major leading developer of ARM microcontroller cores, using the ARM M7 core along with the ART AI accelerator in the dual-core M4/M7 STM32H7 and STM32F7 series. A new family, N6, points to using a new core.
Supporting AI in industrial and embedded designs was a key driver of the recent acquisition of French software tools developer Cartesiam, and is part of a strategy to achieve $20 billion in revenue between 2025 and 2027.
The new STM32N6 neural MCU significantly reduces the price point of AI technology implementation. This breakthrough supports our roadmap for a new generation of smart sensors, allowing rapid adoption in smart cities," said Vincent SABOT, executive managing director of developer Lacroix.
The choice of architecture is key to adding security support and integrating with cloud services, the M55 and M85 support the ARMv8.1-M architecture. Yesterday, STMicroelectronics announced deals with Microsoft and Amazon to connect microcontrollers to the cloud.
ST is integrating its 160MHz ARM Cortex-M33 core-based STM32U5 microcontroller (MCU) with Microsoft Azure real-time operating system (RTOS) and IoT middleware and certified ARM Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M) security implementation Embedded System Services.
The integration uses the hardened security features of the STM32U5, complemented by the hardened key storage of the STSAFE-A110 secure element.
The integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) also uses the STM32U5, this time using Amazon's FreeRTOS real-time operating system and ARM Trusted Firmware (TF-M) for embedded systems.
The reference implementation is based on ST's B-U585I-IOT02A IoT Node Discovery Kit and supports USB, WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity and multiple sensors. The STSAFE-A110 secure element support comes preloaded with IoT object credentials to help secure and simplify the connection between connected objects and the AWS cloud.
FreeRTOS includes a kernel optimized for resource-constrained embedded systems and software libraries for connecting various types of IoT endpoints to the AWS cloud or other edge devices. AWS's Long Term Support (LTS) for two years on FreeRTOS releases provides developers with a stable platform to deploy and maintain their IoT devices.
Hardware cryptographic accelerators, secure firmware installation and updates, and increased resistance to physical attacks provide PSA Certified Level-3 and SESIP 3 certification.
ST will release the STM32Cube-based Azure and AWS Integration Reference Implementation Integration in Q3 2022, leveraging tight integration with the wider STM32 ecosystem to further simplify IoT device design.
