MCUs: Microcontrollers can run without a battery in energy-harvesting systems

The company is claiming to offer the industry's lowest power consumption for devices that can provide up to 25-MHz peak performance, increased amounts of embedded flash memory and RAM, and integrated peripherals, such as USB and LCD interfaces.

The power consumption is specified at 160 microAmperes/MHz in active mode and 1.5 microAmperes in standby. Hence, the MSP430F5xx MCUs enable longer battery life and the ability to use smaller batteries for portable applications. In some cases, no batteries at all are needed when the MCUs are employed in energy harvesting systems that run off of solar power, vibration energy, or human body temperature.

By integrating both RF and encryption into the device, a host of new applications are enabled, including personal medical, automated meter reading, and security. TI's developers say that the MSP430F5xx offers 50% higher processing performance, running at a peak frequency of 25 MHz, and double the flash and RAM of previous MSP430 generations.

A wake up time of less than 5 microseconds with full status retention from both standby and sleep modes provides full performance on demand and instant reaction to events like external interrupts. Multi-channel DMA permits data exchange with peripherals while the core remains in low-power modes.

The intelligent digital and analog peripherals consume no power when not in operation. A high-resolution timer enables applications like voice-activated home security systems. Up to 1 Mbyte of linear memory mapping enables robust user interfaces, as well as applications for ZigBee and other low-power RF sensor networks.

The family comes with up to 16 kbytes of RAM and up to 256 kbytes of flash. Read/erase/write capability goes down to 1.8 V. For applications based on two AAA batteries, flash write is possible down to the battery end of life voltage of 0.9 V for each battery.

The MSP430F5xx family is 100% instruction set-compatible with earlier-generation MSP430 devices, making upgrades easy and increasing the number of available peripherals. Some members are sampling now.

Package options include both 80- and 100-pin thin quad flatpacks (TQFPs), the latter with additional general-purpose I/Os. Depending on packaging options, pricing on the new devices ranges from $3.29 to $4.85 each in quantities of 1,000. . For more information, go to www.ti.com/5xx