STMicroelectronics Delivers First Stellar Advanced Automotive Microcontrollers for New Roadster Program

China, June 24, 2021 - STMicroelectronics (ST; NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving multiple electronics applications, has begun delivering its first Stellar SR6 family of automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) to major automotive companies developing next-generation advanced automotive electronics applications with enhanced performance and safety.

Designed for high-performance and energy-efficient vehicle platforms, the Stellar SR6 family of highly scalable MCUs is scheduled for volume production in 2024. Specifically suited for automotive domain controllers, the new MCUs simplify vehicle electrical system wiring, enable the development of software-defined platforms, enable more flexible and richer functionality, and improve system reliability.

Marco Monti, President of ST's Automotive and Discrete Products Division, said: "We have successfully tested the innovative technical features of the Stellar SR6 MCU in conjunction with our key customers, and this game-changing MCU has now reached the milestone of delivering the first products for the new road car program planned for production. . These MCUs are key enabling technologies for the future of smart connected cars and will make cars safer, greener and provide a more satisfying driving experience for users, while car manufacturers and licensing partners can strengthen customer relationships with this MCU's value-added services."

The Stellar SR6 MCU features ST's robust FD-SOI process with excellent soft error rate (SER) immunity, ensuring a highly reliable system suitable for ISO 26262 ASIL-D safety level functional safety applications.

The new products feature hardware virtualization, allowing multiple applications to coexist securely while maintaining performance and ensuring real-time performance and determinism, enabling multiple independent applications or virtual electronic control units (ECUs) on the same MCU chip, giving designers greater design flexibility.

Stellar's innovative dual-image memory enables efficient software over-the-air (OTA) updates with significant memory capacity savings, and is innovative in that it supports a single PCM during OTA updates. PCM access speeds are faster than other non-volatile memories, such as 1T (single transistor) NOR flash.

The Stellar SR6 MCU family is divided into two platform families, P and G. The Stellar P series is highly integrated and has a high speed of access compared to other non-volatile memories such as 1T (single transistor) NOR flash.

Designed to meet the needs of next-generation powertrain systems and electrified integration/domain systems, the Stellar P series of highly integrated MCUs delivers robust real-time performance and stability for a superior and safe driving experience.

The Stellar G-Series highly integrated MCUs feature highly efficient cryptographic gas pedals, increased security for CAN, LIN and Ethernet data transfers, and a wide range of integrated communication interfaces. With its flexible and variable low quiescent current low power mode and intelligent monitoring subsystem, the Stellar G series microcontrollers ensure excellent overall energy efficiency.

Each family can be tailored to the target application, providing an optimized, rational solution for next-generation automotive needs.

Detailed Technical Information

The Stellar SR6's high-performance architecture meets the automotive industry's stringent requirements for performance, determinism, flexibility, functional safety and data security with the following product features.

- Six Arm® Cortex®-R52 cores with lock-step and split/lock features to meet ISO 26262 ASIL-D level requirements

- Efficient software isolation platform for application integration: Embedded virtualization through Cortex-R52 VM manager privilege level, VM manager and application VM ID (VMID) based access protection for all levels of the architecture (primarily core MPU, on-chip network firewall)

- High-performance on-chip PCM phase-change memory with single-bit modification for improved read/write performance, single-bit failure prevention, enabling innovative application design approaches (both NVM and RAM features) and native EEPROM support

- eMMC (embedded multimedia card) and Hyperbus™ external memory interface

- Three Arm Cortex-M4 cores with floating-point units and support for DSP extended instruction sets for application-specific computing acceleration and security subsystems.

- A hardware security module (HSM) that fully supports the EVITA (Electronic Security Vehicle Intrusion Protection Application) network protection architecture. Together with multi-bus routing technology, the HSM module protects connections to time-sensitive vehicle networks (Ethernet, CAN-FD, LIN)

- Dedicated cryptographic gas pedal for handling MACsec (Media Access Control Security Protocol), IPsec (IP Security Protocol Suite) and CAN authentication.