Should we hope for long-term use of stm8?

[Vyacheslav Azarov]

Posted on October 12, 2017 at 14:20

Hello everybody,

Recently, the company has been actively offering to transfer your projects from 8-bit micro-controllers to 32-bit ones. In view of this, I had concerns about the feasibility of future developments with the use of STM8. I like these efficient and inexpensive processors, and I would not want to lose this engineering resource in the near future. If anyone can, anything, say about this, then please participate.

#stm8 #future

[Thomas G]

Posted on October 25, 2017 at 19:59

Seen the competition from low-end ARM cores one might argue that the air for High- and Medium-Density STM8 devices is getting thin. For large scale products royalties play a big role, and the circumstance that the low-density family includes automotive devices makes it likely that excess capacities will continued to be marketed as commercial products in the foreseeable future (including Value Line devices). Replacing the µC in a consumer product with 2 years useful life is easy - getting out of 10 year delivery obligations of an automotive product not so.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 25, 2017 at 22:12

>>

Replacing the µC in a consumer product with 2 years useful life is easy - getting out of 10 year delivery obligations of an automotive product not so.

Still, even with multiple sources there are a whole bunch of 'Game Over' situations, especially with older technology, or things which have unique or exiotic features.

You should have contract clauses that protect you from things which are outside your control. ie Natural disaster, failure of suppliers, etc.

[Thomas G]

Posted on October 25, 2017 at 22:43

Clive One, I guess you're right. However, the point is that automotive companies already negotiated such clauses, and Joe Small-Scale won't need to worry too much (and it's safe to assume that the automotive purchase departments know their business well). I once worked in an SME, and natural disaster events that had an impact on availability of critical components happened about once in 4-5 years. Using parts primarily used in 'automotive' allowed production to continue, even if it was sometimes difficult to get components. Of course, it's wise to always have the next design ready, and to manage hardware dependencies well (e.g. with some kind of abstraction layer) but at small scale that's easier said than done, and using µCs with a primary automotive market mitigates some of the risk.

[Laurent VERA]

Posted on October 26, 2017 at 17:14

STM8 is a product with a 

http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/support/resources/product-longevity.html

from ST. We typically renew this longevity commitment at the beginning of every year. We recently introduced new 8 PIN STM8 device . STM8 volumes keep on growing, the product is very successful.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 26, 2017 at 17:39

I'm not doubting your commitment, just looking at my last 10 years in the semiconductor industry. Where your commitment will really get challenged is in year 8-9 when a 15-year old piece of critical test hardware fails and the vendor is 3 generations beyond that, no one has spare parts or the replacement runs $2M, or the vendor that encapsulates the package goes bankrupt or merges with a competitor, or the factory gets destroyed in an earthquake/tsunami or is in the middle of a radioactive no go zone.

These things are ultimately predicated by business conditions.

[Laurent VERA]

Posted on October 26, 2017 at 17:58

Hi Clive,

Actually, all this is a matter of supply chain management and business continuity plan.

In the semiconductor business, volume is key to maintain production.

If you were to sell a custom product for a very high volume application (such as a mobile phone for instance), it would be difficult to commit on a 10 year production since your volume rely on a single product / single application. 

STM8 and STM32 are used in thousands of end products, we do not rely on a major customers to drive our volumes. We know volumes will not drop in the next 10 years. The vast majority of our customers have extremly long design cycles.

For the production facilities, we have a dual sourcing policy either running or as a back up (wafer diffusion / test / assembly).

[Vasile Guta_Ciucur]

Posted on October 26, 2017 at 18:28

Unfortunately, there are no 5V tolerant devices? I still see them as a strong (European) alternative to the Microchip products, especially AVRs.

[Laurent VERA]

Posted on October 27, 2017 at 06:33

STM8S is a 5V device. STM32 has 5V tolerant IO

[Vasile Guta_Ciucur]

Posted on October 27, 2017 at 11:42

Didn't knew that. checked only the L variant, as I use already the STM32L 5V tolerant micro. I'll see what you have 'in store' . You'll be able to popularize them even more if you make the Cube to generate the SDCC code.

[Pavel A.]

Posted on October 28, 2017 at 01:00

Philipp,

Thank you for RTOS suggestions. Atomthreads looks good, but with at most 2K RAM size, its use of RAM for stacks may be prohibitive.

About IDEs - the only important aspect for us is a visual debugger. To edit and build, we can use any decent free IDE - even Visual Studio  but because of the debugger we stick to STVD. Cosmic seems to have their own debugger, but it is not included in their free STM8 package, even as trial. Which means, costs, licensing nuisance and so on... not a deal when we have a free and decently working debugger.

-- pa