Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) announces MSP430 microcontrollers with embedded 512K Flash and 64K RAM. These larger memory resources enable MSP430 devices to easily manage wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi® and ZigBee®, making it a companion microcontroller for TI's broad portfolio of wireless connectivity applications including the SimpleLink™ family. The MSP430F66xx microcontrollers can also better support over-the-air firmware updates, graphical software libraries and more complex computing algorithms. Further easing system design, the new MSP430 family offers advanced analog integration, providing an embedded signal chain to enhance analog performance for sensor interfaces, eliminate external components and enable features such as text to speech capabilities. The combination of larger memory, integrated analog, 160-segment LCD driver and USB allows for smaller form factors and reduced system cost along with the ultra-low-power performance of the MSP portfolio. Additionally, the new MSP430F66xx devices are a code and pin compatible extension of MSP430F663x microcontrollers, which offer 256K Flash and 16k RAM, for a simple design migration path and maximum flexibility.
MSP430F66xx microcontrollers are supported by a variety of software resources. This includes MSP430 Driver Library<, which provides a full set of peripheral drivers, as well as the MSP430 USB Developers Package that delivers a complete USB software stack and code examples for rapid application development. In addition to TI's software resources, Micrium® RTOS µC/OS-II support is available enabling fail-safe, mission critical systems in real-time environments as well as a variety of wired and wireless protocol stacks such as the Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) enabling Continua Certified(tm) telehealth applications. Target boards, including the MSP-TS430PZ100C and MSP-TS430PZ100USB, are available at TI's eStore with an experimenter board featuring audio capabilities coming later this year.
MSP430F56xx and MSP430F66xx microcontrollers are priced from $4.25 USD in volume units. Samples are immediately available. The MSP-TS430PZ100Cand MSP-TS430PZ100USB target boards are available for $75 USD.