Dear STM team,
do you consider to add "Programmable IO" (PIO, as in RP2350) or FlexIO (as in NXP MCUs) to your chips?
It would be really cool: often I need interfaces on MCU which are not available as a peripheral devices, such as: MDIO (Master), JTAG (as a host adapter), VGA display. Having a state machine implementing such interfaces via GPIO would be a great enhancement of your chips.
I see a trend towards to have FPGA fabrics in MCU (or FPGA with MCU, Zync, PolarFire) plus having flexible I/Os, programmable I/Os, able to implement new interfaces and protocols.
For instance: your QSPI peripheral is not a full bi-directional (full-duplex) interface. I cannot use it in regular SPI mode. But I would need QSPI and SPI on the same external devices. It would be nice to have a feature like PIO, FlexIO, in order to implement when it is not supported by on-chip peripherals.
Thank you.
(I am diverting away from STM after being a long time user due to such missing features)
