Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: STMicroelectronics | Subject: ST7FOX series
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 04 January 2008
Flash microcontrollers on a budget
Devices achieve remarkably low unit cost with a simplified feature set, while maintaining the benefits of a robust and proven technology.
STMicroelectronics has come up with an ultra-low-cost series of Flash microcontrollers for highly cost-sensitive products such as electric bicycles, air conditioning, small appliances and sensors The ST7FOX series includes devices with from 2 to 8Kbyte of on-chip Flash memory, and with eight to 32 pins, all of which are priced below the critical US $0.50 threshold
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Part of the well-established and popular ST7 family of MCUs, built on an industry-standard 8bit architecture, the new devices achieve their remarkably low unit cost with a simplified feature set, while maintaining the benefits of a robust and proven technology.
ST7FOX operates at +5V (plus or minus 10%) power supply, and includes a relaxed RC oscillator which can be calibrated within the application.
The CISC (complex instruction set computer) architecture is a significant advantage for the production of compact code matching the small memory footprint of the family's devices, with nested interrupt management and a variety of addressing modes in the core architecture simplifying high level language coding.
ST7FOX is designed to satisfy the increasing needs in the industry for reliable low-end and very low-cost MCUs for use in cost-critical applications.
However its upgrade path to the easy-to-use ST7Lite family - itself a cost- effective solution - also enables manufacturers to build scalable product families to address broader markets.
The very low pricing enables designers to implement a microcontroller solution to replace electromechanical or logic-based control, and for the same cost as ROM devices this Flash-based family will ease inventory management and simplify the supply-chain.
A free integrated development environment (IDE), including a C compiler, minimises costs for developers.
Samples of ST7FOX are available now as: 8-pin DIP or SO-8 packaged devices with 2Kbyte of Flash, and 32-pin DIP or LQFP devices with 4Kbyte of Flash.
All are priced at less than US $0.50 in large quantities.
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