MCUs Sport DMA And Dual 12-Bit DAC

Oct. 28, 2002

Direct memory access (DMA) support is almost nonexistent in low-end microcontrollers (MCUs). So the inclusion of three DMA channels, coupled with the addition of two high-performance, 12-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs), makes Texas...

William G. Wong

The DMA channels, which offload peripheral support from the 16-bit RISC processor, can operate with most of the on-chip peripherals, including the DACs. The combination can be used to create complex waveforms. DMA can also be used with the serial channels that support I²C.

The MSP430 line of 16-bit RISC processors has a register-based architecture with 11 general-purpose registers and a memory-based stack. The registers help minimize memory access while making it easy and efficient to program using C. Over half of the MSP430 development is done in C. On-chip JTAG support lowers development tool cost.

Flash memory updates are password protected to prevent accidental overwrites. Flash programming is rated at 100 kcycles.

The MSP430F16x chips cost $7.95 with 60 kbytes of flash and 2 kbytes of RAM. Non-DMA versions are priced as low as $0.49.

Texas Instruments Inc., www.ti.com; (800) 336-5236.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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