St introduces Stellar Advanced Automotive microcontrollers for the new road car program

     STMicroelectronics has begun delivering its first Stellar SR6 series vehicle gauge microcontrollers (MCUS) to major automakers to develop the next generation of advanced automotive electronics applications with improved performance and safety.

     The Stellar SR6 series of highly scalable MCUS are designed for high-performance and energy-efficient vehicle platforms and are scheduled for mass production in 2024. The new MCU is particularly suitable for automotive domain controllers, simplifying the wiring of vehicle electrical systems, enabling the development of software-defined platforms for more flexible, richer functionality, and improved system reliability.

     Marco Monti, President of ST's Automotive and Discrete Devices Division, said: "In conjunction with key customers, we have tested the innovative technical capabilities of the Stellar SR6 MCU, a game-changing MCU that has successfully passed testing and is now on track to deliver the first products for the planned production of the new road car project. These MCUS are key enabling technologies for the smart connected car of the future, making vehicles safer, greener, and providing a more satisfying driving experience for users, while automakers and licensing partners can strengthen customer relationships through the added value of these MCUS."

     The Stellar SR6 MCU uses ST's robust FD-SOI process with excellent soft error rate (SER) immunity to ensure high system reliability for functional safety applications at the ISO 26262 ASIL-D safety level.

     The new product features hardware virtualization that allows multiple applications to safely co-exist while maintaining performance and ensuring real-time performance and certainty, enabling multiple independent applications or virtual electronic control units (ECUs) on the same MCU chip, giving designers greater design flexibility.

     The first microcontrollers in the Stellar SR6 P and G series are equipped with phase change memory (PCM) of up to 20MB, ensuring excellent read/write performance, long data retention, and compliance with AEC-Q100 class automotive standards. Stellar's innovative dual-image storage enables efficient software over-the-air (OTA) updates and significant storage capacity savings, with the innovation of supporting PCM cell configuration during OTA updates, doubling storage capacity to 2 x 20MB. Compared to other non-volatile memory, such as 1T(single transistor) NOR flash memory, PCM memory access is faster.