72 MHz Cortex-M3 with 768 KB Flash — the workhorse MCU for industrial control
The STM32F103VFT6: It packs 80 general-purpose I/Os, a full set of connectivity including CANbus, USB, SPI, I²C, and UART/USART, plus dedicated peripherals such as DMA, motor-control PWM, and a 16-channel 12-bit ADC with two 12-bit DACs. This part is the mainstream choice for motor drives, industrial PLCs, building automation, and any application needing a balanced mix of processing headroom, memory, and peripheral integration without moving to a higher-cost family.
768 KB Flash (768K x 8) and 96 KB SRAM (96K x 8).
80 I/O and the peripheral set — what the motor-control PWM and DMA mean for your BOM
With 80 I/Os in a 100-pin LQFP, you have enough pins to drive a parallel LCD, interface to an external memory bus, and still have room for a dozen sensor inputs and actuator outputs. The motor-control PWM timer with complementary outputs and dead-time insertion is a hardware feature that offloads the core — no software bit-banging for three-phase inverter control. The DMA engine moves ADC results, UART data, and SPI frames without CPU intervention, which keeps the 72 MHz core free for the control algorithm. The 16-channel 12-bit ADC samples at up to 1 µs per channel, adequate for current sensing in motor drives at typical PWM frequencies.
The internal POR/PVD circuits handle power-on reset and supply-drop detection, saving an external supervisor in many designs.