Mixed-signal with micro-power

But the low power credentials don’t come at the price of performance, according to TI. It claims that the MSP432 not only delivers more performance for the same — or even less — power than the existing MSP430, but is the industry’s lowest power Cortex-M4F platform available. It has achieved this by adopting an ultra-low power approach to the design architecturally — like breaking the RAM in to eight banks, each of which can be shut down independently to save around 30nA per bank, or putting some of the driver library in to ROM on the chip itself to reduce the power needed to access it — and by developing a proprietary 90nm ultra low leakage Flash process on which to build the new device.
According to the company, the Cortex-M4F wasn’t the first choice of core due to its power requirements, but the process returned such low power that the team was able to use the -M4F and benefit from its extra performance without incurring a power consumption penalty in operation. With the core running at 48MHz the device consumes 95uA/MHz, and just 850nA in standby. As a mixed-signal device, it features a range of peripherals including a 14bit ADC which consumes 37uA at 1Msample/s.
The company also announced a new cloud-based IDE and compiler, which will eventually support all of the company’s MCUs but initially only supports the new MSP432. The company believes cloud-based tools will become increasingly important to its customers and predicts their use could outpace the use of locally installed tools within 3 years.