MSP430 for new designs?

[nickds1]

Years ago, I had quite a lot of s/w that I wrote for MSP430s - environmental monitoring stuff where ultra-low-power etc. was extremely important, i.e. running off a coin cell for months... IoT motes...

Coming back to this now, over 7 years later, where does the MSP430 stand in ultra-low-power IoT mote rankings? Who are the competitors in that rarefied field? Do TI want the MSP430 to live on? What's their commitment? etc. etc.

Just would appreciate comments from those with actual experience in this rather select field of ultra-low-power design...

Ta

[josip]

Nothing changed with TI MSP430 family in last 7 years, when FRAM series was filled up. Last year they enered to Cortex-M0+ world, with MSPM0(C/L/G).

EDIT: I see that same question appear on e2e, maybe there you will find some answers (not related to competitors).

[hans]

Besides FRAM, one of the killer features in MSP430 is the clock demand feature. High frequency peripherals can request its clock while the part is in a sleep mode, so you can have A/D or SPI stuff running at a proportionally low power consumption (instead of largely offset by a continuously running HFOSC).

Now this feature has started to appear in many ARM parts: many modern SiLabs chips, STM32U5, etc.

In terms of CPU horsepower or efficiency, I think the MSP430 falls a bit behind for a while. STM32L4 used to be my previous favorite, with many oscillator settings thanks to its MSI at a fairly okay efficiency.
Now I've switched over to STM32U535, with DC/DC runs at 24MHz under 2mW. Its more a mid/high-end MCU with low power domain bolted on (like only a subset of peripherals support clock requests), though, but it manages fairly well nonetheless.

[dietert1]

Our MSP430 based oximeter modules run at about 10 mW including the finger probe LEDs, but they would be hosted by some Arm Cortex consuming ten times as much. No coin cells!
An Arm Cortex is a different beast, as in general when you need more computing power you want to use a clock generation scheme involving a PLL. So a typical low power application with an Arm Cortex will be more like 3 or 5 mA, of course with a lot more computing power, especially for floating point. I do remember a 1 mA Arm Cortex project that implemented remote control for some audio equipment.

Regards, Dieter

[nickds1]

Nothing changed with TI MSP430 family in last 7 years, when FRAM series was filled up. Last year they enered to Cortex-M0+ world, with MSPM0(C/L/G).

EDIT: I see that same question appear on e2e, maybe there you will find some answers (not related to competitors).

Yep - that's me too! Seems that the MSP430 stuff is still in production, but no new devices for years. The future is definitely with ARM and, for me, the M0 range.

I've just asked if there are any TI ARM Launchpads, specifically those with integrated power monitoring - these were extremely useful development environments, quite apart from being super cheap!

[Peabody]

MSP430 is a bit unusual in that it's a 16-bit processor, von Neumann architecture.  And of course very low power.  I suspect TI feels obligated to continue support for all the existing implementations, but if they aren't really being used much for new designs, they will become more and more expensive.  And I think other parts have pretty much caught up on low power.  If you can deep sleep an AVR part at some fraction of a microamp, that's competitive.  I don't know how common that kind of low-power performance is on Arm, but I would think that's the way you want to go if possible.

[nctnico]

If the price is right then the MSP430 could still be a candidate.  Power consumption during sleep is one thing (doing nothing is easy), but low power when running is another. The architecture is also good (single memory map, well featured CPU and a decent number of registers for a C compiler to work with).