ST Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q

Overview

The Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q board, featuring an ARM Cortex-M33 based STM32U5A5ZJ MCU, provides an affordable and flexible way for users to try out new concepts and build prototypes by choosing from the various combinations of performance and power consumption features. Here are some highlights of the Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q board:

  • STM32U5A5ZJ microcontroller in LQFP144 package

  • Internal SMPS to generate V core logic supply

  • Two types of extension resources:

    • Arduino Uno V3 connectivity

    • ST morpho extension pin headers for full access to all STM32 I/Os

  • On-board ST-LINK/V3E debugger/programmer

  • Flexible board power supply:

    • USB VBUS or external source(3.3V, 5V, 7 - 12V)

    • ST-Link V3E

  • Three users LEDs

  • Two push-buttons: USER and RESET

  • USB Type-C ™ Sink device FS

Hardware

The STM32U5A5xx devices are an ultra-low-power microcontrollers family (STM32U5 Series) based on the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M33 32-bit RISC core. They operate at a frequency of up to 160 MHz.

  • Includes ST state-of-the-art patented technology

  • Ultra-low-power with FlexPowerControl:

    • 1.71 V to 3.6 V power supply

    • -40 °C to +85/125 °C temperature range

    • Low-power background autonomous mode (LPBAM): autonomous peripherals with DMA, functional down to Stop 2 mode

    • VBAT mode: supply for RTC, 32 x 32-bit backup registers and 2-Kbyte backup SRAM

    • 150 nA Shutdown mode (24 wake-up pins)

    • 195 nA Standby mode (24 wake-up pins)

    • 480 nA Standby mode with RTC

    • 2 µA Stop 3 mode with 40-Kbyte SRAM

    • 8.2 µA Stop 3 mode with 2.5-Mbyte SRAM

    • 4.65 µA Stop 2 mode with 40-Kbyte SRAM

    • 17.5 µA Stop 2 mode with 2.5-Mbyte SRAM

    • 18.5 µA/MHz Run mode at 3.3 V

  • Core:

    • Arm® 32-bit Cortex®-M33 CPU with TrustZone®, MPU, DSP, and FPU ART Accelerator

    • 32-Kbyte ICACHE allowing 0-wait-state execution from flash and external memories: frequency up to 160 MHz, 240 DMIPS

    • 16-Kbyte DCACHE1 for external memories

  • Power management:

    • Embedded regulator (LDO) and SMPSstep-down converter supporting switch on-the-fly and voltage scaling

  • Benchmarks:

    • 1.5 DMIPS/MHz (Drystone 2.1)

    • 655 CoreMark® (4.09 CoreMark®/MHz)

    • 369 ULPMark™-CP

    • 89 ULPMark™-PP

    • 47.2 ULPMark™-CM

    • 120000 SecureMark™-TLS

  • Memories:

    • 4-Mbyte flash memory with ECC, 2 banks readwhile-write, including 512 Kbytes with 100 kcycles

    • With SRAM3 ECC off: 2514-Kbyte RAM including 66 Kbytes with ECC

    • With SRAM3 ECC on: 2450-Kbyte RAMincluding 322 Kbytes with ECC

    • External memory interface supporting SRAM,PSRAM, NOR, NAND, and FRAM memories

    • 2 Octo-SPI memory interfaces

    • 16-bit HSPI memory interface up to 160 MHz

  • Rich graphic features:

    • Neo-Chrom GPU (GPU2D) accelerating any angle rotation, scaling, and perspective correct texture mapping

    • 16-Kbyte DCACHE2

    • Chrom-ART Accelerator (DMA2D) for smoothmotion and transparency effects

    • Chrom-GRC (GFXMMU) allowing up to 20 % of graphic resources optimization

    • MIPI® DSI host controller with two DSI lanes running at up to 500 Mbit/s each

    • LCD-TFT controller (LTDC)

    • Digital camera interface

  • General-purpose input/outputs:

    • Up to 156 fast I/Os with interrupt capability most 5V-tolerant and up to 14 I/Os with independent supply down to 1.08 V

  • Clock management:

    • 4 to 50 MHz crystal oscillator

    • 32 kHz crystal oscillator for RTC (LSE)

    • Internal 16 MHz factory-trimmed RC (± 1 %)

    • Internal low-power 32 kHz RC (± 5 %)

    • 2 internal multispeed 100 kHz to 48 MHz oscillators, including one autotrimmed by LSE (better than ± 0.25 % accuracy)

    • Internal 48 MHz

    • 5 PLLs for system clock, USB, audio, ADC, DSI

  • Security and cryptography:

    • SESIP3 and PSA Level 3 Certified Assurance Target

    • Arm® TrustZone® and securable I/Os, memories, and peripherals

    • Flexible life cycle scheme with RDP andpassword-protected debug

    • Root of trust thanks to unique boot entry and secure hide-protection area (HDP)

    • Secure firmware installation (SFI) thanks to embedded root secure services (RSS)

    • Secure data storage with hardware unique key (HUK)

    • Secure firmware upgrade support with TF-M

    • 2 AES coprocessors including one with DPA resistance

    • Public key accelerator, DPA resistant

    • On-the-fly decryption of Octo-SPI external memories

    • HASH hardware accelerator

    • True random number generator, NIST SP800-90B compliant

    • 96-bit unique ID

    • 512-byte OTP (one-time programmable)

    • Active tampers

  • Up to 17 timers, 2 watchdogs and RTC:

    • 19 timers: 2 16-bit advanced motor-control, 4 32-bit, 3 16-bit general purpose, 2 16-bit basic, 4 low-power 16-bit (available in Stop mode), 2 SysTick timers, and 2 watchdogs

    • RTC with hardware calendar, alarms, and calibration

  • Up to 25 communication peripherals:

    • 1 USB Type-C®/USB power delivery controller

    • 1 USB OTG high-speed with embedded PHY

    • 2 SAIs (serial audio interface)

    • 6 I2C FM+(1 Mbit/s), SMBus/PMBus™

    • 7 USARTs (ISO 7816, LIN, IrDA, modem)

    • 3 SPIs (6x SPIs with OCTOSPI/HSPI)

    • 1 CAN FD controller

    • 2 SDMMC interfaces

    • 1 multifunction digital filter (6 filters) + 1 audio digital filter with sound-activity detection

    • Parallel synchronous slave interface

  • Mathematical coprocessor:

    • CORDIC for trigonometric functions acceleration

    • FMAC (filter mathematical accelerator)

  • Rich analog peripherals (independent supply):

    • 2 14-bit ADC 2.5-Msps with hardware oversampling

    • 1 12-bit ADC 2.5-Msps, with hardware oversampling, autonomous in Stop 2 mode

    • 12-bit DAC (2 channels), low-power sample, and hold, autonomous in Stop 2 mode

    • 2 operational amplifiers with built-in PGA

    • 2 ultra-low-power comparators

  • ECOPACK2 compliant packages

More information about STM32U5A5ZJ can be found here:

Supported Features

The Zephyr nucleo_u5a5zj_q board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

CAN/CANFD

on-chip

canbus

CLOCK

on-chip

reset and clock control

DAC

on-chip

DAC Controller

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

I2C

on-chip

i2c

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

SPI

on-chip

spi

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

WATCHDOG

on-chip

independent watchdog

BKP SRAM

on-chip

Backup SRAM

RNG

on-chip

True Random number generator

Other hardware features are not yet supported on this Zephyr port.

The default configuration can be found in the defconfig file: boards/arm/nucleo_u5a5zj_q/nucleo_u5a5zj_q_defconfig

Connections and IOs

Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q Board has 10 GPIO controllers. These controllers are responsible for pin muxing, input/output, pull-up, etc.

For more details please refer to STM32 Nucleo-144 board User Manual.

Default Zephyr Peripheral Mapping:

  • CAN/CANFD_TX: PD1

  • CAN/CANFD_RX: PD0

  • DAC1_OUT1 : PA4

  • I2C_1_SCL : PB8

  • I2C_1_SDA : PB9

  • I2C_2_SCL : PF1

  • I2C_2_SDA : PF0

  • LD1 : PC7

  • LD2 : PB7

  • LD3 : PG2

  • LPUART_1_TX : PG7

  • LPUART_1_RX : PG8

  • SPI_1_NSS : PA4

  • SPI_1_SCK : PA5

  • SPI_1_MISO : PA6

  • SPI_1_MOSI : PA7

  • UART_1_TX : PA9

  • UART_1_RX : PA10

  • UART_2_TX : PD5

  • UART_2_RX : PD6

  • USER_PB : PC13

System Clock

Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q System Clock could be driven by internal or external oscillator, as well as main PLL clock. By default System clock is driven by PLL clock at 160MHz, driven by 4MHz medium speed internal oscillator.

Serial Port

Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q board has 6 U(S)ARTs. The Zephyr console output is assigned to USART1. Default settings are 115200 8N1.

Backup SRAM

In order to test backup SRAM you may want to disconnect VBAT from VDD. You can do it by removing SB50 jumper on the back side of the board.

Programming and Debugging

Nucleo U5A5ZJ-Q board includes an ST-LINK/V3 embedded debug tool interface. This probe allows to flash the board using various tools.

Flashing

Board is configured to be flashed using west STM32CubeProgrammer runner. Installation of STM32CubeProgrammer is then required to flash the board.

Alternatively, openocd (provided in Zephyr SDK), JLink and pyocd can also be used to flash and debug the board if west is told to use it as runner, which can be done by passing either -r openocd, -r jlink or -r pyocd.

For pyocd additional target information needs to be installed. This can be done by executing the following commands.

$ pyocd pack --update
$ pyocd pack --install stm32u5

Flashing an application to Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q

Connect the Nucleo U5A5ZJ Q to your host computer using the USB port. Then build and flash an application. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

Run a serial host program to connect with your Nucleo board:

$ minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0

Then build and flash the application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nucleo_u5a5zj_q samples/hello_world
west flash

You should see the following message on the console:

Hello World! arm

Debugging

Default flasher for this board is openocd. It could be used in the usual way. Here is an example for the Blinky application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nucleo_u5a5zj_q samples/basic/blinky
west debug

Building a secure/non-secure with Arm ® TrustZone ®

The TF-M applications can be run on this board, thanks to its Arm ® TrustZone ® support. In TF-M configuration, Zephyr is run on the non-secure domain. A non-secure image can be generated using nucleo_u5a5zj_q_ns as build target.

$ west build -b nucleo_u5a5zj_q_ns path/to/source/directory

Note: When building the *_ns image with TF-M, build/tfm/api_ns/postbuild.sh bash script is run automatically in a post-build step to make some required flash layout changes.

Once the build is completed, run the following script to initialize the option bytes.

$ build/tfm/regression.sh

Finally, to flash the board, run:

$ west flash

Note: Check the build/tfm directory to ensure that the commands required by these scripts (readlink, etc.) are available on your system. Please also check STM32_Programmer_CLI (which is used for initialization) is available in the PATH.