MSP430 a Good Fit for Portable Mixed Signal Designs

Texas Instruments (TI) positions the MSP 430 family as ultra-low microcontroller family power. The family has five different configurations, depending on the availability of Flash, ROM / OTP, LCD controller etc besides RAM on a family of devices. For example MSP 430x1xx family has Flash on board, ROM but no LCD controller. There are other variants of the family, according to mixed signal devices available on a particular chip. The overall family has a total of 163 units with enough members of each sub-family to choose from a specific project. You can adjust a diverse set of projects for these devices.


What is truly remarkable is the true low power consumption for these devices when idling and when they deliver the processing power. These devices can retain data available on the system RAM at current levels of as low as 0.1 Amp, real-time clock mode of 0.8 micro micro amp and delivers a total processing power of 250 micro amps per MIP. The ADC and DAC devices provides the relationship with the analog world. Timers both real time and general purpose can provide various timing requirements of an embedded system. Watch dogs timers make sure there are no lock ups in the software operation. flash memory controller, DMA controller control on board resources. LCD controller, when available on the chip provide interface to LCD displays. The USART device may be available as UART, SPI UART configured for communication or UART configured for I2C communication. A JTAG access helps development, during the debug phase and field maintenance too.

Architecturally all the resources are connected via a bus system address and the system data bus in a classic von Neumann fashion. While the data bus is 16-bit flash connection, memory or ROM / OTP resources an adapter scales down to 8-bit operation to connect devices on board. Thus, all these devices are memory mapped directly. The flexible interrupt structure helps implement real-time monitoring and control very easy to implement. The programming model is a linear space that includes special function registers (PC, SP and so on), general purpose registers, peripherals (both 8 and 16 bit), memory resources and vectors interruption. SFR occupy the lower end addresses, while the upper end is occupied by the interrupt vectors. Dual duty records as constant generator 1 and 2. The rest are fully general purpose registers.

Development tools to take care of addressing mode. Being RISC devices these modes are not complex at all. They are the recording mode, indexed mode, symbolic mode, absolute mode, indirect register mode, indirect auto-increment and immediate mode. development boards, tool chain, JTAG support and every other developmental needs are supported by different manufacturers, and IT.