Decoding ST's "Marketing Status" entries

[Bassett.David]

Hello,

Can anyone provide a bit of clarity regarding ST's "Marketing Status" terminology? For example, in the STM32CubeMX MCU/MPU selector, I see the following entries for various 'H7 devices:

"NA", "Proposal", "Evaluation", "Preview" & "Active". I presume these are not arbitrary and hope they are defined at the corporate level? It's not entirely clear (at least to me), which order they even go in...

Hope this doesn't seem like whining - thanks for any insight you can provide!

Regards,

Dave

[Ozone]

Speaking from experience on the customer side (I'm not affiliated with ST in any way), only the "Active" state denotes a part currently in production.

Evaluation" "Preview" are prototypes od pre-series models you might get as selected customer, usually along with an NDA.

For "Proposals", there is not silicon yet.

You forgot "NRND", near the end of life of a silicon.

This system is used by many vendors, not only ST.

[Bassett.David]

Hello Ozone,

Thank you for your insight. This confirms my suspicion that it's only safe to embark on a PCB layout if the device shows as "Active". Even then it can take quite a while to show up in distribution - witness the STM32H742VG which appeared only recently.

[Ozone]

That is a thing to arrange with your project manager(s).

The H7, I think, is a special case, perhaps because of overboarding complexity ...

In my former company, we had offers from several silicon vendors to make specific variants for us, basically standard MCU with our specific periphery. That usually requires 10k+ purchased devices p.a.