feature article
Subscribe Now

MCUs For the Indecisive

TI’s Microcontroller Family Has a Bit of Everything

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” — T. S. Eliot

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. We know we want wireless, but what kind? We want sensor interfaces, but which type? We need networking, but from whom?

Let me introduce you to a little company from Dallas that solves all those problems at once. Texas Instruments (you may have heard of them) has rolled out a whole slew of MCUs that come with just about every conceivable wired, wireless, and sensor interface known to man. Can’t make up your mind? Got an indecisive product manager? Pick a TI MCU and worry about those decisions later.

TI has always offered a lot of options. The company’s product portfolio resembles a Sears & Roebuck catalog from the 1890s. Pages and pages of MCUs, sensors, amplifiers, and converters have been keeping EEs happy for generations. But that doesn’t mean they’re nostalgically mired in the past. Nosiree, everything’s up to date in the Big D. Witness the new MSP430, C2000, and Sitara processors now rolling off the fab lines. What all these disparate devices have in common is a flexible attitude toward networking, either amongst themselves or with physical devices. What we have here is an ability to communicate.

On the wired side, TI’s new chips support ProfiBus, ProfiNet, EtherCAT, Sercos, BiSS, TSN, and a handful of others you’ve never heard of. Over in the wireless realm, we see old favorites like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, combined with relative newcomers like Thread, ZigBee, and TI’s own descriptively, if somewhat unimaginatively, named “sub-1GHz” protocol.

These new MCUs all fall under the “SimpleLink” brand name, although individual chips belong to their own specific product families as well (e.g. MSP432). The new CC13xx parts and CC26xx parts (which are obviously twice as good) are based on Arm’s Cortex-M4 cores, puttering along at 48 MHz. Flash capacity, SRAM, I/O pinout, and package are negotiable, as you’d expect.

The trick to SimpleLink’s polyglot flexibility is a separate Cortex-M0 core inside the chips that manages the RF interface. TI programs the parts with whatever protocol stack is required to meet the relevant standard(s). Changing your wireless interface doesn’t necessarily mean changing the hardware. Just reprogram the part and go.

As if all that weren’t enough, you can even create your own proprietary wireless interface. It’s your chance to invent another new standard! TI’s EasyLink abstraction layer – not to be confused with SimpleLink – provides some of the rudimentary basics, atop which you can build your own protocol stack.

Now that you’ve got your chips talking, you need something for them to talk about. TI also took the wraps off a new batch of wireless sensors in its new mmWave product line. The five new mmWave chips are position, angle, and motion sensors operating in a broad spectrum between 30 GHz and 300 GHz (hence the mmWave name). The new chips are said to be accurate down to 100 microns, which is more than enough for most industrial or automotive applications. Short wavelengths (high frequencies) are nice because they provide a high degree of accuracy and antennas are small. But they also have a hard time penetrating any kind of material (walls, plants, raindrops). Their high sensitivity often means they need to be mounted very solidly or be well compensated for movement. But that’s what MCUs are for.

featured blogs
Mar 28, 2024
'Move fast and break things,' a motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg, captures the ethos of Silicon Valley where creative disruption remakes the world through the invention of new technologies. From social media to autonomous cars, to generative AI, the disruptions have reverberat...
Mar 26, 2024
Learn how GPU acceleration impacts digital chip design implementation, expanding beyond chip simulation to fulfill compute demands of the RTL-to-GDSII process.The post Can GPUs Accelerate Digital Design Implementation? appeared first on Chip Design....
Mar 21, 2024
The awesome thing about these machines is that you are limited only by your imagination, and I've got a GREAT imagination....

featured video

We are Altera. We are for the innovators.

Sponsored by Intel

Today we embark on an exciting journey as we transition to Altera, an Intel Company. In a world of endless opportunities and challenges, we are here to provide the flexibility needed by our ecosystem of customers and partners to pioneer and accelerate innovation. As we leap into the future, we are committed to providing easy-to-design and deploy leadership programmable solutions to innovators to unlock extraordinary possibilities for everyone on the planet.

To learn more about Altera visit: http://intel.com/altera

featured chalk talk

USB Power Delivery: Power for Portable (and Other) Products
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Bel
USB Type C power delivery was created to standardize medium and higher levels of power delivery but it also can support negotiations for multiple output voltage levels and is backward compatible with previous versions of USB. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Bruce Rose from Bel/CUI Inc. explore the benefits of USB Type C power delivery, the specific communications protocol of USB Type C power delivery, and examine why USB Type C power supplies and connectors are the way of the future for consumer electronics.
Oct 2, 2023
23,151 views