Texas Instruments is targeting medical wearables for what it says is the world’s smallest microcontroller, introduced at last week’s Embedded World in Nuremberg.

The MCU expands TI’s Arm Cortex-M0+ MSPM0 portfolio. Measuring 1.38mm², about the size of a black pepper flake, the wafer chip-scale package (WCSP) for the MSPM0C1104 MCU (www.ti.com/product/MSPM0C1104) can help designers optimise board space in applications such as medical wearables and personal electronics, without compromising performance.

“In tiny systems such as earbuds and medical probes, board space is a scarce and valuable resource,” said Vinay Agarwal, vice president at TI (www.ti.com). “With the addition of the world’s smallest MCU, our MSPM0 MCU portfolio provides unlimited possibilities to enable smarter, more connected experiences in our day-to-day lives.”

He stressed during the launch that every device in the portfolio was built by TI, letting the firm control quality and supply.

“At TI, we want to ensure we are at the forefront of this technology,” he said. “If we can pack more features and keep it small, that is our advantage. That is the driving force of what we do.”

And Yiding Luo. TI’s project line manager, said: “We are giving the designers more space so they can increase the battery size. It is not just tiny, it packs a lot of features.”

With more than 100 MCUs, the MSPM0 MCU portfolio offers scalable configurations of on-chip analogue peripherals and a range of computing options to enhance the sensing and control capabilities of embedded designs.

The size of the eight-ball WCSP is 1.38mm², making it 38% smaller than competing devices.

The MCU has 16kbyte of memory, a 12bit analogue-to-digital converter with three channels, six general-purpose input-output pins, and compatibility with standard communication interfaces such as uart, SPI and I²C.

The MSPM0 MCUs have pin-to-pin compatible package options and feature sets to match memory, analogue and computing requirements in personal electronics, industrial and automotive applications.

For support, TI’s ecosystem includes a software development kit for all MSPM0 MCUs, a hardware development kit for rapid prototyping, reference designs and subsystems, which are code examples for common MCU functions.

TI’s Zero Code Studio tool (www.ti.com/tool/MSP-ZERO-CODE-STUDIO) lets users configure, develop and run MCU applications in minutes without coding. Engineers can take advantage of this ecosystem to scale designs and reuse code without the need for significant hardware or software modifications.