August 04, 2025
The requirements for today’s microcontrollers are increasing, with growing demands for improved power efficiency, real-time networking capabilities, and reliable processing and compatibility for vision and audio tasks. Applications relying on these must often shift away from traditional MCUs and toward modern microcontrollers that are capable of handling higher-performance computing, AI acceleration, and more.
The STM32N6 High-Performance Microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics are powered by the Arm Cortex-M55 featuring Arm Helium. The Helium-M-Profile Vector Extension (MVE) is equipped with 150 instructions and is designed for the execution of advanced DSP and machine-learning code. The MCU also features an in-house NPU, the ST Neural-ART Accelerator, designed for power-efficient edge AI applications and algorithms. It operates at 1GHz with 600 GOPS, achieving an average of 3 TOPS.
STM32N6 Microcontrollers in Action
For memory, the STMicroelectronics’ MCU supports 4.2MB of built-in RAM without flash memory, but can connect to external memory like RAM or Flash via fast and low-pin-count interfaces with 8- or 16-bit connections. A Flexible Memory Controller also supports PSRAM, SDRAM, NOR, and NAND.
The extended multimedia capabilities of the MCU are enabled by the Chrom-ART 2D graphics hardware acceleration for rendering and UI performance, as well as the Chrom-GRC (Graphic Resource Cutter) for non-square displays. The MCU also supports the NeoChrom Accelerator for advanced drawing, perspective correction, and texture mappings. For additional video and image processing, the STM32N6 MCUs feature the H.264 Encoder delivering 720p/1080p at 30fps and a JPEG Hardware Accelerator.
The Image Signal Processor (ISP) provides input from a 5MP camera at 30fps with three different outputs from the same input. There’s also support for multiple camera interfaces such as MIPI CSI-2 (2-lane) and 16-bit parallel interface, in addition to the STM32-ISP-IQTune tool for ISP tuning.
Getting Started with STM32N6 Microcontrollers
For security, the STM32N6 microcontrollers support target SESIP level 3 and PSA level 3 certifications, TrustZone®, side-channel-resistant AES / PKA and Fast AES / SHA, and RIF tenant-aware firewalling.
For a closer look at the edge AI applications supported by the STMicroelectronics STM32N6 Microcontrollers, check out the video below:
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