Texas Instruments has introduced three new members of their MSP430 16-bit low power microcontroller family, the MSP430F23x, MSP430F24x, and MSP430F26x.

The TI MSP430 is the 4th most popular 16-bit microcontroller architecture, made popular for it's extremely low power. The supply current demands for the MSP430 are so stingy that TI regularly shows a demo of an MSP430 running off of a grape-copper-zinc battery.

The largest amount of Flash available in these new MSP430 families is 120KBytes, although with only 4KBytes RAM. A 116KByte device is available with only 8KBytes RAM. For more options, see the selection guide below.

Features of the new product families include:

• Low power MSP430 RISC Core
• 16MHz operation
• Up to 120 KBytes Flash
• Up to 8KBytes of RAM
• 900nA standby current
• 1 usec wakeup
• 3-channel DMA with support for Round Robin priority
• 8-channel 12-bit ADC, (INL ±1.7LSB, DNL ±1LSB max)
• 2-channel 12-bit DAC
• 2 UCSI interfaces support I2C, SPI, IrDA and UART
• -40 to +105°C operation

"The release of the new MSP430F2xx MCU products offers more than upgrades to higher performance, lower power and more design flexibility to our MSP430 customers," said Kevin Belnap, MSP430 Product Marketing Manager. "It also opens a new range of application possibilities for portable embedded control systems that require more memory as well as other systems that can benefit from the high level of analog integration."

 

New TI MSP430 Microcontrollers

Development Tools
The new TI MSP430 16-bit Low Power microcontrollers are supported by a wide range of development tools. Starter Kits come with everything required to complete an entire project, including a target board, debugger and programming interface, free Kickstart software and cables. The eZ430 is a USB key that contains all the necessary hardware and software in a portable USB stick enclosure. The eZ430 tools includes a free software IDE and debugger, with the option of designing a stand-alone system or detaching the removable target board to integrate into an existing design. Experimenter boards, as well as a free software development kit, are also available.

About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated is the leading supplier of DSP technologies. Texas Instruments provides DSP and analog technologies to meet customers’ real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company includes the Education Technology business. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design and sales operations in more than 25 countries.