ST has been serving customers in the automotive market for over 30 years and provides them with a range of products and solutions covering most applications in a typical vehicle. As the market has evolved, so has ST's offering, a key part of which is automotive microcontrollers (MCUs).
www.electronicsmedia.info/, Apr. 03, 2025 –
ST pioneered embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) with ST10 and then introduced automotive microcontrollers with its SPC5 range based on PowerPC architecture, shipping more than one billion MCUs in automotive. Cost-effective automotive controllers from the STM8 family complemented this offer.
ST’s latest generation of automotive microcontrollers is the Stellar family, which is the industry’s first Arm®-based portfolio that spans the entire automotive MCU spectrum, from low-end to high-end solutions. These advanced microcontrollers reduce complexity, ensure safety and security, and deliver optimal performance and efficiency of next-gen vehicle architectures and features. Customers can benefit from shorter development times and focus on bringing innovation and differentiation for their software-defined vehicles (SDVs) in this highly competitive market. For these reasons Stellar products are gaining momentum, particularly among our customers in Asia and Europe.
Stellar is the industry’s first family of emerging technologies after eFlash, representing the most mature and smallest memory cell automotive grade solution on the market. The Stellar family is optimized for electrification, including X-in-1 vehicle motion control computing, new vehicle architectures, zonal and domains, and safety MCUs for safety-critical subsystems, such as ADAS.
It fully supports automotive transformation by integrating multiple functions safely into a single device and allowing the continuous integration of new features in vehicles. This is made possible with key technologies, including a right choice of core technology, virtualization, Ethernet support and ground-breaking memory technology embedded in the automotive MCUs–a game changer for customers faces challenges with application memory sizing.
Stellar MCUs are based on Arm Cortex-R52+ technology. This high-performance processor delivers real-time virtualization support for time-critical secure and safety systems. It can run multiple applications simultaneously with freedom from interference. And thanks to fully programmable auxiliary cores it is possible to accelerate specific functions, such as routing, low power management, digital filtering while offloading the main cores.