The MSP430 is a popular choice among hardware designers 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 (PMS430E3xx) and high volume
mask ROM (MSP430Cxxx) versions, all of the devices are
in-system programmable via
JTAG or a built in
bootstrap loader (BSL) using
RS-232.
