MSP 430 opinions?

MSP430 in NOT a DSP.

What is it you want to know ???

Jim Sanders wrote:

Some models have a 16 x 16 hardware multiplier.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Also some models have very low power consumption, which is nifty in some cases. Good Luck. Wenhai

I really enjoy the msp430. We use them at work for most of our microcontroller needs. They come in many pinouts from 20 pins on up. The MLP package is very small. The assembly language is straight forward RISC type. There is a freeware gcc compiler for it called mspgcc, which is fairly mature and has a very friendly listserv. The development boards are fairly cheap and you can get them from olimex (just google search for olimex msp430). It's also fairly easy to make your own boards to play with, if you know how to do pcb layout at all. Also you don't want to use these for DSP's unless you have very light duty processing needs, much better to use one of the SHARC family dsp's or something from TI.

Hi Jim,

The MSP430 offers some great features that others don't. You can, for example, keep a realtime clock running in there and it still consumes just a few microamps. But one word of caution: It is intended for 3.3V apps and lower, you cannot easily use them for 5V stuff. This can also make driving larger FETs a bit harder.

Regards, Joerg

IIRC, the clock rate (at least in the MSP43F149 I've used) tops out at 8MHz. If you're planning to use it for DSP, your input signals better not have a very high bandwidth. I do like the fact that it has two serial interfaces (which can be UARTS or Synchronous), a 12-bit ADC, and pretty capable timers.

Mark Borgerson

MSP430 most would call a Microcontroller, not a DSP. If you really want DSP, look at

TI now have FLASH, ROM, and RAM variant offerings in this family. Why RAM ? - it boots from cheap SPI memory, and means they can run faster than Flash.

-jg