After an intense couple of weeks looking at Wearables you get to see patterns and trends emerging in this market and STMicroelectronics is popping up in a lot of devices so I decided to ask why. I spoke with Yan Loke who is a Principal Marketing Engineer in Silicon Valley for ST.
This points to what may be a key to ST’s success and that’s the breadth and depth of their semiconductor portfolio. A quick search across Octopart.com shows that major distributors have thousands of ST parts in stock; DigiKey alone haves over 13,000 ST parts available for immediate shipment. Yan told me that this breadth of portfolio in sensors, power, connectivity and microcontrollers means that ST is in the consideration set for many kinds of designs.ARM Wearables Week is right after the bi-annual Electronica show in Munich and ST, like most electronics companies, were pushing out new products. At the show ST released the world’s smallest MEMS pressure sensor - the LPS22HB - and now offers an open-source library license for their huge range of MEMS sensors. Yan told me that ST is continually innovating across their vast portfolio of devices and just announced a new ultra-low power MEMS 3D accelerometer and gyro (LSM6DS3) that consumes less than 1mA of current -- when most highly accurate gyro’s draw 4 to 5mA.
Another tactic that ST uses is offering very inexpensive Dev kits like their Nucleo board (see picture below) which sells for just $15 but is often given away at hands-on training sessions around the world.
ST has found a sweet spot by combining their breadth of ARM microcontrollers with their MEMS manufacturing skills and this has had an early impact on the wearables market in many design wins and is perhaps best illustrated in the Pebble watch, which could be described as a “system on a wrist”—and which ST describes as Smart Me.ST has a range of Nucleo boards, each based on an ARM Cortex-M core, and can be easily programmed with the mbed IDE (video here). A few weeks ago I posted a blog on EETimes.com showing pbeckmann of DSP Concepts using a Nucleo board in a very cool audio application where he pointed out how easy they are to use.
As we move through ARM Wearables Week it’s really interesting to see how different ARM partners use their heritage and technology expertise to address the wearables market in so many different ways.
What do you think is the perfect combination of tools and hardware to start a wearables design project?
Not to forget:
Open.MEMS licensing program born to offer to our customers an easy way to evaluate, program and play with sensors, shortening time-to-development
our smart sensor hubs INEMO modules systems on board using the ARM technology Cortex-M and much more to discover in our Sense and Power world.
STM32 Open Development Environment the new innovative approach for developping applications such as Wearables but not only!