Texas Instruments says it has shrunk the size of its smallest microcontroller unit in its industry, the new MCU-sized black pepper size.
The MCU packaging measures only 1.38 square millimeters and is part of the company's embedded design ARM Cortex series. TI said the product is targeted at small products, including medical wearables, earplugs, stylus and electric toothbrushes. The product includes a 12-bit analog to digital converter with 16KB of flash memory and 1KB of SRAM and runs at 24MHz.
Small devices are called MSPM0C1104. Alas, that's fascinating (the technique doesn't have pepper).
TI said the price of microcontrollers is 1,000 shares per unit, meaning the company can start opening the robot spider project’s troop, priced as low as $200. TI's Embedded World and Other MCUs (Marvel-related) in Nuremberg, Germany (not related).
Open up opportunities
William Luk, a consultant and technologist at Quanandary Peak Research, said MCU shrinkage offers an opportunity for previously impossible micro devices.
“One of the important verticals of micro-device is in healthcare and surgery: smart pills, embedded sensors, and even surgical devices that can reach places like never before,” Luke said.
Luke also said the innovation could be enough to move Texas Instruments into the MCU developer chain, currently dominated by Stmicroelectronics, Infineon, NXP, Microchip and Renesas Electronics.
“With the new Ti MCU, we can see that new super micro devices are targeted not only for consumers, but also for commercial purposes (such as healthcare). However, there are challenges in government approval (for medical devices). The manufacturing of these new micro devices can also be challenging,” Luke said.
Correction on March 14: An earlier version of this story wrongly listed the cost of a microcontroller. The price per unit is 20 cents.
