TI has big plans for frugal 16bit MCU family

Texas Instruments plans to add over 50 new devices to its MSP430 ultra-low-power microcontroller family in the next 18 months.

Demonstrating continued commitment and vision in the ultra-low-power market, Texas Instruments has launched a massive expansion of the MSP430 ultra-low-power microcontroller (MCU) platform with plans to add over 50 new devices in the next 18 months.

TI's MSP430 device portfolio expansion answers growing market demands, as industry analysts predict that ultralow power will continue to be a major growth driver in the MCU market for industrial, medical and consumer products.

The first devices introduce TI's smallest, lowest power MCUs ever - the MSP430F20xx MCU series - which offers a tiny 14-pin, 4 x 4mm footprint and 16MIPS of 16bit performance with pricing starting at $0.49 (100,000 units) for the MSP430F2001 MCU.

"Portable consumer and industrial applications continue to become more sophisticated, and their power requirements are outpacing by far the progress made in battery capacity", said Max Baron, Principal Analyst, In-Stat.

"The TI MSP430 MCU platform, designed for systems requiring ultralow power, advances the industry's capabilities in portable power management for better battery utilisation and longer standby".

"Aside from executing workloads at low power on its own, the MSP430 MCU can also conserve power in high-performance systems employing it as a wake-up and power sequencing device".

The new MSP430F20xx MCUs are TI's first devices based on the recently announced F2xx architecture that operates with a cool active current of 200uA/MIPS.

A flexible clock system allows operation up to 16MHz with no external components using an improved digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) that is fully programmable and stable over temperature and voltage.

The ability to switch from standby to a fully synchronised 16MIPS active mode in less than 1us allows interrupt event-driven programming that extends time in power-saving modes and the use of smaller, lower cost batteries.

The 14-pin footprint combined with a sub-1uA standby current provides benefits in space constrained applications such as fire and motion detectors for which OEMs may choose to reduce cost and liability with factory-installed, sealed batteries that last over ten years.

"Our customers challenged us to provide a tight-fit MSP430 MCU solution for cost sensitive consumer and security systems applications without sacrificing ultra-low power, performance and ease of use", said Mark Buccini, TI's Advanced Embedded Controls Director of Marketing.

"We made no compromises".

"At only 4 x 4mm, the MSP430F20xx is one of the smallest MCUs available and runs at 16bit for the price of other 8bit MCUs".

"It also packs 16MIPS and less than 1uA standby with the choice of performance analogue convertors".

"These pin-compatible devices operate from 1.8 to 3.6V and unlike competitive devices; the series is fully loaded and is 100% code compatible with all existing MSP430 families, allowing developers to leverage a single MCU platform from the most basic to the most sophisticated applications".

All F20xx devices offer in-system programmable flash for greater design flexibility, field upgrades and elimination of external EEPROMs.

128byte of RAM, when combined with a full featured CPU, allows full development in C without a hand-coded assembler.

To further reduce system cost, all 10 GPIO pins include programmable pull-up/pull-down resistors eliminating external components.

A zero-power brown-out reset (BOR) function and an enhanced watchdog timer enhance reliability.

All the failsafe features of F2xx devices are available during all modes of operation with no power penalty.

The MSP430F20x2 and MSP430F20x3 MCUs include a universal serial interface (USI) that can be configured for either I2C or SPI master or slave communication.

To accelerate F20xx MCU design-in, designers can begin development with TI's existing MSP430 USB or parallel port JTAG pods that support the new Spy Bi-Wire interface and provide designers with world-class emulation from day one.

Beginning in Q4 2005, customer can also purchase the MSP-FET430U14, which includes a new USB-based, JTAG interface target board and a complete integrated development environment including a debugger, assembler/linker and C complier.

Following the MSP430F20xx MCU series, TI will introduce in Q4 2005 the first in a family of enhanced MSP43FG46xx processors with an extended 1Mbyte memory model, allowing access to 16 times more memory compared with the 64Kbyte available today.

Extended instructions designed for the large memory allow optimal high-level code density with full backward compatibility, making it possible to develop very sophisticated real-time applications completely in modular C libraries.

The first enhanced device from the MSP430FG46xx generation - the FG4619 MCU - will incorporate 120Kbyte of embedded Flash memory and a complete signal chain on chip (SCoC), making it ideal for applications like portable medical devices that require the high integration and large memory options of a single chip solution.

Later in 2006, TI's MCU expansion will continue with new families of devices with increased MIPS, 5V and 125C capabilities, USB 2.0, low voltage operation and wireless connectivity.

TI will showcase the MSP430F20xx, MSP430FG46xx and other devices from the MSP430 MCU platform for the first time at the MSP430 Advanced Technical Conference (ATC), the premier 2.5-day event for all MSP430 MCU developers.

The ATC is held in November and December in Dallas, Texas, Munich, Germany, Taiwan as well as China.

MSP430F20x3 MCUs have begun sampling to high volume customers with full production scheduled Q4 2005.

MSP430F20x1 and MSP430F20x2 MCUs will sample in Q4 2005 with production early 2006.

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