Microcontrollers to manage security of SiC and GaN devices
STMicroelectronics has added mathematical accelerators to increase speed and save energy in the next-generation of digital power applications with the release of STM32G4 microcontrollers.
They were developed to manage electronic products with sensor-driven features and higher-efficiency power technologies such as silicon carbide (SiC) or gallium nitride (GaN). Targeting digital power applications and consumer and industrial appliances, the STM32G4 microcontrollers introduce two new hardware mathematical accelerators to boost processing of applications using Cordic (Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer), an algorithm for handling elementary mathematical functions, which is claimed to provide high accuracy. The STM32G4 microcontrollers also have filtering functions to support increased performance and energy efficiency.
The accelerators are dedicated to increasing the speed of calculations such as trigonometry for energy-saving motor controls in appliances or air conditioners and filtering for signal conditioning or digital power control. According to ST, they compute results faster and more efficiently than the general-purpose main processor, thus offloading the core to receive more sensor data and control additional user functions.
Other features of the STM32G4 include higher-resolution power conversion timers with functions that offload the CPU, together with analogue peripherals and converters, connections for fast responses to external events, and support for the latest USB-C interface with Power Delivery (PD) that allows fast charging or conveniently powering devices up to 100W.
The STM32G4 microcontrollers can be used in products addressing smart-living, smart-factory, and smart-energy applications, for example e-bikes, digital power supplies, advanced motor controls, lighting and building-automation products.
The microcontrollers also have scalable, securable memory area for secret storage and secure live firmware upgrade, debug-access prevention after programming to reduce threat surfaces, AES-256 encryption, unique device ID, and true random-number generator (TRNG).
The STM32G4 series builds on the ART Accelerator and CCM-SRAM Routine Booster, to enhance dynamic and static memory-cache performance for superior whole-application and real-time performance on an efficient power budget, respectively.
The hardware mathematical accelerators introduce a filter-math accelerator (FMAC) and dedicated CORDIC engine. These peripherals deliver faster results for rotational and vector trigonometry used in motor control, as well as general logarithmic, hyperbolic, and exponential functions, IIR/FIR filtering for signal conditioning or the 3p/3z controller in digital power supplies, and vector functions such as convolution and correlation, explains ST. The STM32G4 series is built on a high-speed 170MHz implementation of the Arm Cortex-M4 core, with floating-point unit and DSP extensions, benchmarked at 213DMIPS and 550 CoreMark.
