What is stm32 commonly used in? Are there many companies and products that use it? What are the prospects for future applications? In the field of automotive electronics will have a place?

When you really enter the automotive electronics industry, I myself is engaged in automotive electronics. In fact, it does not necessarily say that the automotive electronics, anyway, is the industrial design, each product MCU is almost customized, and will not use those of the generality of the MCU.

An analogy, such as engaged in the automotive instrumentation, if the use of general-purpose MCU (such as the STM32F103RBT6), but also have to look for a special liquid crystal driver chip, stepper motor driver chip, CAN Transceiver chip (this STM32 seems to have CAN), EEPROM (if the capacity is not enough to add) and so on. When you do the math, the cost is very high.

But if there is a chip that accommodates so many functions at the same time, and removes all the other unneeded functions, and the price is almost the same as a piece of STM32F103RBT6, I don't think there is anyone who would still choose this kind of general-purpose chip. With industrial design, most of the pressure to reduce costs will fall on the R&D people.

In the field of automotive electronics, Freescale and Renesas have done a good job, and these are the MCUs that we use the most in our company. Unless STM32 has MCUs designed specifically for automotive electronics, or the company wants to make a higher-end platform, we generally won't consider using a general-purpose chip.

Of course, as the pursuit of their own technology, learning STM32 is a good choice, if you handle this, then the other MCU are small dishes, huh, personal opinion.