$99 Development Tool Accelerates Ultra Low Power Design

3rd April 2007

ES Admin

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Enabling designers to quickly develop ultra low power medical, industrial and consumer embedded systems using either a highly integrated signal chain on chip (SCoC) MSP430FG4618 or small 14-pin F2013 microcontroller, Texas Instruments has announced today the availability of the MSP430 Experimenter's Board (part number MSP-EXP430FG4618). Along with the two 16-bit MSP430 devices, the board includes a TI (Chipcon) radio frequency (RF) module connecter for developing low power wireless networks. The board also features a number of input and output options such as a microphone, buzzer, liquid crystal display (LCD), capacitive touch-pad, push buttons, and pin board prototyping space, among others.

With two MSP430 MCUs, designers can easily develop a variety of low power and battery operated products including cost and space sensitive sensing applications like motion detectors, all the way to highly integrated applications like high precision portable medical and industrial sensing.
The F2013 is a small 4mm x 4mm, 14-pin device that features a fully programmable clock system that provides wake-up from an industry leading 500 nano-amp standby to full-speed operation in less than one micro-second. The F2013 device also includes a 16-bit sigma-delta analog to digital (ADC) for
high-precision sensing systems, 2KB of flash and 128B of RAM memory and a basic serial communication interface (USI) which makes SPI and I2C implementations easy.

The FG4618 MCU includes 116KB of flash memory and incorporates the MSP430X core architecture with extended 1MB memory model. The extended memory access is ideal for today's larger system requirements and allows for the development of very sophisticated real-time applications, completely in
modular C libraries. Up to three operational amplifiers-to handle high precision instrumentation-coupled with the on-board 200ksps 12-bit ADC, 1 micro-second code-to-code settling time 12-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and direct memory access controller (DMA) complete a signal chain on
chip (SCoC) solution that reduces overall system cost and eliminates the need for external components.

Combined with the two devices is a host of interfaces and input/output options that allow a designer to quickly evaluate the suitability of either MSP430 MCU. JTAG headers on the board make both devices accessible for programming and debugging as well as communication between the two MSP430s
or to other external devices. A variety of input options include a microphone, capacitive touch-pad, and push buttons. Output peripherals include a buzzer, LCD, RS232 communication interface, and 3.5mm headphone jack for analog output. To accelerate the development of low power wireless
RF systems, the Experimenter's Board includes connectors for various Chipcon evaluation modules, which cover the separately.