Out dated conventional circuit techniques still used by ST Microelectronics!

[pskoog]

Please forward this message to the MCU development team.

The ST Microelectronics MCUs still use old school techniques and supports the coin-type polyacene capacitor battery and external crystal oscillators, despite advancements in semiconductor designs. Practically, extremal crystal oscillators are no more used and on-chip high performance and relatively cheap oscillators have replaced such an approach! Additionally, super capacitor backup power is no more used in advanced designs and memory cells can still retain the charge using more advanced techniques!

I am not here to explain all such advanced circuit design techniques but would like to point out the out dated conventional methods still used by ST Microelectronics!   

[Amelie ACKERMANN]

Hello @pskoog,

Welcome to the ST Community and thank you for your feedback. I have forwarded your input to the responsible team. 

If you have further feedback or questions, please feel free to share it. 

Best,

Amelie

[TDK]

Fairly sure this post is AI generated spam. It's nonsensical and is the user's only post.

[unsigned_char_array]

So what exactly is your question or proposal?

 

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@pskoog wrote:

Additionally, super capacitor backup power is no more used in advanced designs and memory cells can still retain the charge using more advanced techniques!

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The RTC (Real Time Clock) cannot run without power, so you need a source of backup power. A side effect is that you can use some spare registers of the RTC peripheral as battery backed up registers. And, with slightly more power consumption, you can enable battery backed up RAM too. I recently used that to log the drop in power supply voltage with an ADC. So it is a very useful feature. No need to use "advanced designs" (whatever that means).
All technologies have tradeoffs, so non-volatile memory and volatile memory have different properties in terms of cost, power consumption and speed. STM32 MCUs have different memories for this exact reason: different types of volatile RAM, FLASH, EEPROM, D-Cache, I-Cache, battery backed up registers, battery backed up RAM. All with different pros and cons.

 

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@pskoog wrote:

Please forward this message to the MCU development team.

external crystal oscillators[...] Practically, extremal[sic] crystal oscillators are no more used and on-chip high performance and relatively cheap oscillators have replaced such an approach!

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STM32 MCUs already have internal oscillators. Some have multiple internal oscillators with different properties (power consumption, frequency range, tolerance). Some are factory calibrated. You could also do your own calibration. They also have examples to calibrate the uncalibrated internal oscillator with the calibrated one. You can also implement temperature compensation since STM32 MCUs often come with at least one internal temperature sensor (sometimes 2 different types).
External oscillators or crystals are not an obsolete technology at all.

The only problem I have with ST oscillators is that some MCUs don't work very well with higher capacity crystals and cannot drive them properly. This is all documented, but you need to find this documentation first. But I understand their design choices somewhat as higher capacity crystals consume more power. Though they are more accurate than lower capacity ones you can calibrate your RTC to compensate for this error using the 500Hz output pin.

 

[mƎALLEm]

Hello @pskoog,

You need to be more specific and provide examples and be fact based, otherwise we will consider that as an AI generated spam which will be removed.

Thank you.