STM32L1 NRND'd

[waclawek.jan]

One of my friends noticed, that ST NRND'd not only the STM8, but also the whole STM32L1xx family.

However, in contrast to STM8, the 'L1 are under the 10-year commitment program, so they should continue to be available in the next 9 years.

 

JW

[Tesla DeLorean]

Sure, and I'm not entirely disagreeing with that.

I've seen these, PIC and 8051 used for initialization of secondary parts.

The main thing is the ability to keep using the same PCB, stencils, etc, over an extended life span, that package and pin compatibility remove a lot of obstacles to adoption.

Also seen STM8 used in radios where the complexity of code is higher.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Yes, I'd like to see people migrate from 8-bit, but everyone complains about why this adoption doesn't move faster, or occur.

One of them is that things that could be a physical drop-in replacement, with a little thought and effort, seem to be ignored. There's a lot of reasons why old designs aren't migrated, not least that the engineers, or source development materials aren't available.

More healthy places do periodic design review and refresh cycles to establish if long lived products can be cost reduced or optimized.

Others wait for the factory to burn down to make a decision to change..

[waclawek.jan]

Hi @Peter BENSCH​ ,

> And finally, on the subject of STM8: yes, these devices are no longer on the product longevity list for the next 10 years

So, the STM8 were never part of the 10-year commitment, or you've just simply erased them from that list?

JW

[Viktor POHORELY]

There is no pin to pin compatible replacement of STM8 for good reasons.

All new STM32 development is focused on compatibility within STM32 product family, which has different pinout than STM8 for long time back. Although we have there two pinout styles those days, one driven by historical families and one optimized for small pincount packages like on G0/C0.

[Peter BENSCH]

@Community member​ Um, it may be that I got the STM8 mixed up with the STM8A. But anyway - STM32C0 is meant as a possible alternative for STM8, which are definitely on NRND.

Regards

/Peter

[Peter BENSCH]

> So, the STM8 were never part of the 10-year commitment, or you've just simply erased them from that list?

I've just found them back on the longevity list - all with a longevity commitment start date of January 2022, so the STM8L, STM8S and STM8T will be manufactured until the end of 2031.

Regards

/Peter

[Viktor POHORELY]

Although STM8 is now about 15 years on the market - and original team has been assigned to several other projects since that, as well as some people are no longer here, ST still maintain support capability for this product. However, the response time might be longer than for devices from this decade for two reasons - as product is quite mature, there are no more simple questions, only tricky once remains - and it may take a while to retrieve details of this product from the memories.

[waclawek.jan]

Thanks, Peter, for watching this and letting us know.

Jan

@Peter BENSCH​ 

[Nikita91]

But the C0 has no EEPROM! I would be really interested to know why ST did not put an EEPROM in the C0, while several marketing arguments are invalid because of this absence: STM8 and other 8-bitter replacement, optimized BOM...

And emulation in FLASH is not an argument because the CO do not have a dual bank

[Tesla DeLorean]

Likely because the process technology or the size of the array, are somehow prohibitive?

But yes, I think there needs to be much deeper introspection as to what/why people stick to older parts, and what reasonable accommodations can be made in new designs to encourage portability.

People don't want batteries in products a lot of the time (corrosion, or transportation issue?), but advancement in SuperCaps perhaps could facilitate ultra-low current maintenance of SRAM, or subsection thereof.