Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Texas Instruments (April 2006-) | Subject: MSP430FG461x series
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 15 February 2007
Memory-rich MCUs target real-time
control
Ultra-low-power MCUs are designed for today's larger system memory requirements and allow for the development of very sophisticated real-time applications.
Bringing high integration and ultralow power to complex, deeply embedded industrial sensing applications including portable medical systems, Texas Instruments has announced volume availability of the MSP430FG461x series of ultra-low-power MCUs with up to 120Kbyte Flash memory As the first devices to incorporate the MSP430X architecture - with extended 1Mbyte memory model - the MSP430FG461x series is designed for today's larger system memory requirements and allows for the development of very sophisticated real-time applications, completely in modular C libraries with full backward compatibility
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 25 Apr 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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As the first MSP430X device, the FG461x MCU series includes up to 120Kbyte of Flash and up to 8Kbyte RAM memory.
Medical customers indicate that the FG461x MCU series meets the requirements of portable medical devices like digital pulse oximeters and wireless electrocardiograms that require highly integrated intelligent peripherals and larger memory options on a single chip.
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Up to three operational amplifiers-to handle high precision instrumentation-coupled with the onboard 200Ksample/s 12bit analogue-to-digital convertor (ADC), 1us code-to-code settling time 12bit digital-to-analogue convertor (DAC), and direct memory access controller (DMA) complete a signal chain on chip (SCoC) solution that reduces overall system cost and eliminates the need for external components.
The three-channel DMA eliminates data transfer delays to the on-chip DACs, ADC and other peripherals and frees up the 16bit RISC MSP430X CPU to spend time processing data, instead of performing "handling" tasks.
Also, compared with using an external DAC and software, the MSP430FG4xx on-chip DAC module, coupled with the DMA, provides a greater than ten times increase in achievable analogue output signal frequency.
From a single coin cell, the FG461x MCU can operate for up to ten years by consuming less than two micro-amps in a real time clock standby mode allowing the battery to last beyond the intended life of the product, in many cases.
As applications become more complex, debugging challenges and development time increase exponentially.
Unlike simulator solutions that are often unable to accurately reproduce the application, the embedded enhanced emulation module (EEM) - available on all MSP430 devices - allows designers to accurately debug the hardware/software interactions without the cost and complexity of an in-circuit emulator (ICE).
Using no additional application resources, the EEM runs in real time while allowing single stepping through the code.
The FG461x EEM offers up to eight hardware breakpoints for complex triggers to monitor the data and address buses.
Additional features include nonintrusive state storage trace options with 8 x 40bit ring buffer which allows storage of data-, address buses and various CPU flags without interfering application code execution.
The MSP430FG461x MCU series provides designers with pin-for-pin memory migration from the MSP430F449 MCU.
The FG461x series of MCUs are immediately available in volume quantities and start at US $9.45 in 1000-unit volumes.
Designers can immediately start development on FG461x devices using the USB based MSP-FET430U100 development board.
Requiring no external power, the development board includes IAR Kickstart development software and full CD based documentation, and is available for $149.
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