Applications
The MSP430 can be used for low powered embedded devices. The electric current drawn in idle mode can be less than 1 microamp. The top CPU speed is 25 MHz. It can be throttled back for lower power consumption. The MSP430 also utilizes six different Low-Power Modes, which can disable unneeded clocks and CPU. This allows the MSP430 to sleep, while its peripherals continue to work without the need for an energy hungry processor. Additionally, the MSP430 is capable of wake-up times below 1 microsecond, allowing the microcontroller to stay in sleep mode longer, minimizing its average current consumption. Note that MHz is not equivalent to Million instructions per second (MIPS), and different architectures can obtain different MIPS rates at lower CPU clock frequencies, which can result in lower dynamic power consumption for an equivalent amount of digital processing.
The device comes in a variety of configurations featuring the usual peripherals: internal oscillator, timer including PWM, watchdog, USART, SPI, I²C, 10/12/14/16-bit ADCs, and brownout reset circuitry. Some less usual peripheral options include comparators (that can be used with the timers to do simple ADC), on-chip op-amps for signal conditioning, 12-bit DAC, LCD driver, hardware multiplier, USB, and DMA for ADC results. Apart from some older EPROM (MSP430E3xx) and high volume mask ROM (MSP430Cxxx) versions, all of the devices are in-system programmable via JTAG (full four-wire or Spy-Bi-Wire) or a built in bootstrap loader (BSL) using RS-232.
There are, however, limitations that preclude its use in more complex embedded systems. The MSP430 does not have an external memory bus, so is limited to on-chip memory (up to 256 KB Flash memory and 16 KB RAM) which might be too small for applications that require large buffers or data tables. Also, although it has a DMA controller, it is very difficult to use it to move data off the chip due to a lack of a DMA output strobe.
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