The MSP430 is a microcontroller family from Texas Instruments. Built around a modern 16-bit RISC CPU, the MSP430 is a high performance device designed for ultra low power consumption.

The device comes in a variety of configurations featuring the usual peripherals: 10/12/14-bit ADCs, comparators, timers, USART, LCD driver, watchdog, HW multiplier, internal oscillator, etc. Apart from some older EEPROM (MSP430C3xx) and high volume OTP versions, all of the devices are in-circuit programmable via JTAG or BSL (Boot Strap Loader via RS-232 link).

The MSP430 is a popular choice for low powered measurement devices. The current drawn when the MSP430 is in idle mode is only a few microamps (very few microcontrollers can match it in terms of power consumption) and the cost per chip hovers around a few dollars. There are however limitations that prevent it from being used in more complex embedded systems. The MSP430 does not have an external memory bus (which would allow it to efficiently access external RAM/ROM chips) and the limited memory size of the MSP430 variants might be too small for applications that require large data tables. The architecture is also different from other popular microcontrollers (such as the Intel 186).

Texas Instruments provides software development tools that can be downloaded for free. The tools have a crippled compiler that limits the number of lines that can be compiled. However, the provided assembler is free of any limits. The open source community produces a freely available software development toolset (MSPGCC (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/)) based on the GNU toolset. Also various commercial development toolsets, which include editor, compiler, linker, assembler, debugger and in single cases code wizards, are available.

External links

A constant growing community supports various project and information sites as well as forums:

• MSP430.info (http://msp430.info/)
• msp430 Yahoo!group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/msp430/)
• MSP430web (http://www.elektronikladen.de/msp430/index.html)