Micro Really Needs Just 0.9V

Sept. 15, 2010

Texas Instruments' MSP430L092 is a true 0.9V microcontroller that does not incorporate a charge pump to handle single battery applications.

William G. Wong

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MSP430L092 14-Pin Socket Target Board and USB Programmer

Texas Instruments' 16-bit, 4MHz MSP430L092 is a true 0.9V ROM-based microcontroller. The chips have a 1 Kbyte or 2 Kbyte ROM. A RAM-based version is available for development and deployment where an off-chip serial flash memory can be used to boot the system. The ROM parts have 128 bytes of RAM while the RAM part has 2 Kbytes of on-chip RAM.

Analog periphieral support on the 14-pin chips includes an 8-bit SAR ADC, an 8-bit DAC, and comparator. The chip has a watchdog timer, a pair of 16-bit timers and the GPIO pins that are shared with the analog peripherals. The chip supports the 2-wire JTAG Spy-by-Wire interface.

The MSP430L092 peripherals and I/O do not require a charge pump. This provides consistent, low power requirements and I/O support.

Developers can utilize the MSP-FET430U092 14-Pin Socket Target Board and USB Programmer (Fig.1) for in-circuit debugging and includes 3.3V level shifters for easier development interfacing. Pricing for the MSP430L092 MCUs starts at $0.85. The MSP-FET430U092 is priced at $149. Development tools include IAR Kickstart and the Eclipse-based Code Composer Essentials.

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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