More diverse, more affordable, and easier to use, MSPM0 brings new vitality to the MCU market

Texas Instruments' 32-bit Arm ® Cortex ^® M0+ general-purpose MCU MSPM0 was launched in this environment. As Texas Instruments' first Arm ® Cortex ^® M0+ general-purpose MCU, will this product bring new vitality to the hot MCU market?

In an interview with eeworld, Linda Liu, global marketing manager of MSP HSM at Texas Instruments, summarized the features of MSPM0 in three sentences: "More product combinations, higher cost-performance, and easier to use."

Linda said that although M0+ has been around for more than ten years, the market demand is still strong due to its low power consumption and high cost-effectiveness, covering most applications from industry to automobiles, from consumption to medical care.

In the general embedded market, the most important thing is to have a rich variety of products to cover all kinds of development or upgrade needs of customers. It is expected that MSPM0 will launch more than 100 products this year, covering different packages, pin counts, temperature ranges, and peripherals such as analog and communication, while maintaining pin compatibility with the same package products. "MSPM0 retains its low power consumption characteristics while supporting more functions in digital and analog aspects, and integrating them in a flexible combination." Linda said.

Especially in terms of analog integration, MSPM0 makes full use of Texas Instruments' rich accumulation in analog IP. For example, some MSPM0 products integrate two independent 12-bit ADCs with effective bits up to 11.2 and support hardware oversampling to 14 bits; when sampling, the rate can reach up to 4 MHz. It is difficult for the 12-bit ADC integrated in general MCU to achieve such a high effective bit. MSPM0 also integrates zero-drift operational amplifiers and transimpedance amplifiers, and the amplifiers have time-sharing pin multiplexing functions, so they can replace more external op amps.

In terms of interfaces, MSPM0 integrates CAN-FD control to better meet the needs of industrial or automotive applications. In terms of computing power, although MSPM0 uses the Arm ® Cortex ^® M0+ core, it also integrates a hardware math accelerator IP, which can directly support calculations such as division, square root, and inverse trigonometric functions to improve the computing power of the MCU. In addition, in terms of timers, in addition to supporting general timers, MSPM0 also supports advanced timer multi-channel PWM including dead zone control, fault detection, etc., to better support applications such as motor control. In some applications, this integrated hardware accelerator method may have higher computing power than the equivalent M4 core.

Due to the requirements of the industrial and automotive fields, MSPM0 has also strengthened security management, supporting AES, TRNG, secure boot and ECC memory, thereby enhancing the security performance of the product. In addition, the operating range of MSPM0 is up to 125°C, which is suitable for expansion to more stringent industrial and automotive environment applications.

For embedded applications, BOM cost often needs to be evaluated in detail. This is not only reflected in the product itself, but also needs to be considered as a whole in the system.

MSPM0 is not only fully integrated, but also has performance that is good enough to replace external discrete components, which not only increases the customer's range of choices, but also greatly optimizes the customer's BOM cost.

For MCU, development tools are an important consideration for engineers. Texas Instruments provides a full stack of development tools, various GUIs, as well as sufficient documentation and training tutorials to reduce users' development costs.

First of all, with the help of Arm's rich ecosystem, MSPM0 can take advantage of Arm's rich third-party platforms. At the same time, Texas Instruments is also building an open ecological platform, including middleware, driver libraries, operating systems, motor control and other reference designs and reference codes, and all codes fully consider product compatibility and protect development costs. In addition, Texas Instruments released CCS Theia, which is Eclipse's cloud and desktop platform. It has a better development experience and can significantly improve development efficiency. In terms of graphical development tools, Texas Instruments provides two GUI tools, SysConfig and Analog Configuration, which allow users to configure peripherals more friendly.

Texas Instruments also provides engineers with the MSP Academy training platform, which provides training tutorials for various modules suitable for developers at all stages of learning.

As a key product line of Texas Instruments in the embedded field, MSPM0 aims to serve a wider mass market through a rich product portfolio, thereby further expanding the market of Texas Instruments in MCU, embedded and even peripheral analog products.

"With the new MSPM0 product family and rich resource support, Texas Instruments demonstrates its commitment to providing a scalable product portfolio that gives engineers the flexibility to innovate in nearly any application," said Linda Liu.