Less power, energy efficiency and longer battery life will be what microcontroller major STMicroelectronics would look at when it lines up its new ultra-low-power technology platform for building a range of 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers.

The new range of 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers have the capability to enable future generations of electronic products to consume less power, meet evolving energy-efficiency standards, and operate longer using batteries. 

This new ultra-low-power products provide paths for the 8-bit STM8S and 32-bit STM32F families to achieve power consumption as low as 150µA/MHz from Flash, and STOP-mode power consumption as low as 300nA while maintaining SRAM content and registers. It will be interesting to see if the 300 nA include a Real-Time-Clock too.

ST's new platform is built on a 130nm process. This platform has been optimized with ultra-low-leakage transistors for logic functions, low-voltage transistors for analog functions, innovative low-power embedded memory, new low-voltage low-power standard peripherals and an innovative power-management architecture. It is a major effort to create all this IP in a specific technology, indicating that ST plans to use the 130nm process for a long time to come. This is good news for industrial customers who need long term availability for their products and long term availability depends on the availability of the manufacturing process.

With all these low-power options it remains to be seen how fast the devices will run. Faster processes use higher current and ultra low power processes are by design slower. 

The enhanced analog transistors are functional down to 1.65V, enabling low-voltage operation of the on-chip analog circuitry. The power-management architecture also saves power in all modes through techniques such as low-voltage operation of the core and  very fast 4-microseconds wake-up from low-power states. This requires an internal oscillator. Depending on the accuracy of this oscillator there will be applications that can run using the internal oscillator as an only clock source. 

The dedicated digital libraries and a new low-power system-on-chip (SoC) design flow will enable ST to expand its ultra-low-power microcontroller families and deliver new devices to market quickly.

Development tools for the STM32L are already widely available because the Cortex-M3 provides a standard debugging and programming interface. We will have to wait a little longer for the evaluation boards which will become available shortly after the first devices are sampling. Companies like IAR and Keil provide excellent tools for the ARM based MCUs. Raisonance, a French tool company is in a unique position to provide compiler, debugger and programming support for both STM8L and STM32L families at very low cost. An overview of STM8S tools can be found here on the ST website