MCU for portable medical devices draws very low power

19 May 2004 DSP, Micros & Memory Products & Solutions

Designers of portable medical applications can now simplify their designs and reduce time to market using a new chip from Texas Instruments. Said to be the industry's first single-chip, ultra-low power microcontroller for these applications, the MSP430FG43x family, optimised for portable medical devices, can help designers meet application requirements without having to rely on multichip solutions.

Three precision operational amplifiers make the signal-chain-on-chip (SCoC) MSP430FG43x family highly suited for applications such as personal blood pressure monitors and pulsoxy, pH and glucose meters. The family offers MCU configurations with nine timer channels, a 200 kSaps high performance 12 bit ADC, dual 12 bit DAC, three configurable precision op-amps, one universal sync/async comms interface (USART), 48 I/O pins, a 128-segment LCD driver, with memory configurations of up to 60 KB of Flash and 2 KB of RAM.

To ensure the robustness of an application, a zero-power brown-out reset function, supply voltage supervisor and fail-safe clock system are provided. An integrated direct memory access (DMA) controller increases the signal processing capabilities. The expanded DMA, with triggers from all peripherals, accelerates mixed-signal processing by providing sophisticated data transfer without CPU interaction. With a flexible clock system with five low-power modes, ultra-low-power performance is achieved. The MSP430FG43x family features a typical standby current consumption as low as 1,1 µA with a realtime-clock function active.

The MSP430FG43x devices are fully compatible with the MSP-FET430P430 toolkit, which includes a JTAG interface, target board, Flash devices and a complete integrated development environment including a debugger, assembler/linker and limited C-compiler. The tool supports realtime in-system development, accessing the Flash device's embedded emulation including programming, full-speed, breakpoint and trace capabilities.

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