EYE on NPI: STMicroelectronics STM32C0x1 Series Entry-Level MCU

Adafruit Industries

This week's EYE ON NPI is your next 8-bit microcontroller, it's STMicroelectronics STM32C0x1 Series Entry-Level MCU (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/stmicroelectronics/stm32c0x1-series-entry-level-32-bit-mcu) that gives developers a 32-bit Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller at 8-bit microcontroller prices. These aggressively priced microcontrollers come just at the end of a 2-year chip shortage, so if you've been holding back a design, it could be a great time to swap out your 8051-based or other 8-bit microcontroller for a powerful Cortex M0+ that can use ST's supported firmware libraries and IDE. Most developers go with 8-bit microcontrollers to get a few basic needs met: maybe a few timers, ADC, GPIO and I2C or USART for interfacing. The benefits are low complexity in design, for example no crystal needed because there's an internal trimmed-RC oscillator, or a simple power supply with only one power pin so you don't need multiple regulators. 8051-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8051) microcontrollers are popular as cores for their ultra-low cost and fairly-low power usage. But the programming environment tends to be archaic, and 8-bit code compiles chunky especially when dealing with floating points (https://www.wikihow.com/Convert-a-Number-from-Decimal-to-IEEE-754-Floating-Point-Representation) or large-integer math. If you ever have to do anything more complex like interpolate values or perhaps run a digital filter on your data, an 8-bit micro will be really annoying. Updating to the 32-bit, particularly the Arm Cortex line, will open up the whole universe of optimized and standardized libraries that CMSIS provides (https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/embedded/cmsis) The STM32C0 series is the lower-powered version of the STM32G0 series (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/result?s=N4IgjCBcoLQCxVAYygMwIYBsDOBTANCAG4B2aWehA9lANogBsAHAEysgC6hADgC5QgQAXxFA0 - both are Cortex M0+ chips, but the C0 runs at 48MHz instead of the G0's 64 MHz. The chips are otherwise pin compatible at the low pin-count-end of 8 to 48 pins, the G0 keeps going up to 100 pins. There's 9 different packages, that also have increasing amounts of FLASH/SRAM, with either 16 or 32K of flash and 6 or 12K of RAM. For peripherals you'll get plenty of GPIO, DMA, four 16-bit timers, a 12-bit ADC with 13 channels and surprisingly-high 1.7 MSPS. SPI, I2S, two USART and one I2C. Note there's no USB on the C0 series, for that you'll need to upgrade to the STM 32G0x1 (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/stmicroelectronics/stm32-g0) We haven't featured a lot of microcontrollers on EYE ON NPI lately because we prefer to tell you about parts you can order immediately. The good news about STMicroelectronics STM32C0x1 Series (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/stmicroelectronics/stm32c0x1-series-entry-level-32-bit-mcu) is that they're all in stock right now for immediate shipment (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded/microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgjCBcoLQCxVAYygMwIYBsDOBTANCAG4B2aWehA9lANrgAMAnAExgsgC6hADgC5QQIAL6igA) - in a wide variety of packages and memory options. And if you want to start verifying the parts for your firmware immediately, there's the STM32C0116-DK dev kit (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/STM32C0116-DK/17074591) in stock. Order your STM32C0x1 Series chips or developer kit today, and you can be revising your 8-bit microcontroller design to a 32-bit glow-up by tomorrow afternoon!