STMicro Makes Its NanoEdge AI Studio Machine Learning Tool Free to Use for STM32 Target Devices

STMicroelectronics has announced an expansion of its efforts in the on-device edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) field by making its flagship NanoEdge AI Studio design tool entirely free to use for STM32 family targets.

"Our goal is to ensure that accurate, power-efficient AI algorithms can be built to run on resource-constrained edge computing devices as easily, quickly, and cost-effectively as possible," claims STMicro's Remi El Ouazzane, president of the company's Microcontrollers and Digital ICs Group. "Today, we are taking another big step by allowing developers working in any Arm Cortex-M ecosystem to build and deploy their libraries on as many devices as they need, free of cost, to both them and their users, which we believe will spark innovation further."

Now in version 4.3, the upgraded NanoEdge AI Studio offers native support for both STMicro's own STM32 microcontroller family as well as what the company says is "more than 1,000 production-ready Arm Cortex-M" chips and boards from other companies. The software new includes a step-by-step assistant to ease project creation, and an advanced validation tool the company claims ensures the machine learning models it spits out are ready for use in production.

The idea behind the software is simple: to speed up and simplify the development of energy-efficient on-device machine learning models and their deployment on resource-constrained platforms. Models created in the software also retain the ability to learn directly on-device, something the company has used in the past to demonstrate use-cases ranging from extreme weather prediction and human activity recognition for wearables to fault detection in linear actuators and automated scoring of table-tennis games.

While the new NanoEdge AI Studio 4.3 release is free-of-charge, though, there's a small catch: truly free deployment is only available for projects targeting STMicro's own STM32 microcontrollers. Those using third-party Arm Cortex-M hardware will need to agree to a "special license agreement," the company says, the precise terms of which had not been publicly disclosed at the time of writing.

The NanoEdge AI Studio is available to download now for Windows and Linux on STMicro's website.