A Dev Board for the World’s Tiniest MCU
YouTuber made by morten designed a small development board for the world's smallest microcontroller — and you can too.
Texas Instruments recently released a tiny microcontroller that is making a big splash in the world of electronics. In contrast to most product announcements, it is not the chip’s processing power that is capturing so much attention, but rather its size. At just about the size of a flake of black pepper, the MSPM0C1104 is the smallest microcontroller ever to be produced.
Despite its small size, the team at Texas Instruments has managed to fit an Arm Cortex-M0+ core into the new chip, along with 16KB of flash memory and 1KB of SRAM. It also has plenty of ways to integrate with other devices, including six GPIO pins, a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter with three channels, and UART, SPI, and I2C interfaces.
Those are respectable specifications for a microcontroller, but it is the low-power design and 1.38 square millimeter footprint that makes every electronics engineer and hardware hacker want to get their hands on one, stat. Even casual hobbyists can get in on the action as the MSPM0C1104 costs just a few dimes even in single-unit quantities.
But armchair engineers that order one of these chips might be in for a shock when they open the package. That 8-pin YCJ package is not exactly breadboard-friendly, after all. Fortunately, as Morten of the made by morten YouTube channel demonstrated, with a little bit of work and some inexpensive tools, it is actually reasonably easy to incorporate an MSPM0C1104 into your own circuits.
Morten designed a custom development board for the chip in KiCad. It includes the microcontroller, power supply, GPIO breakouts, and an I2C interface. The final PCB design is a small, two-layer board measuring 30x30 mm.
When components are tiny, the scary part for most of us is the soldering work. How in the world are you going to get those eight pads that are packed into 1.38 square millimeters soldered down in the correct position? As Morten showed, there is no need to sweat it — let a mini hot plate do the heavy lifting for you. With a bit of magnification and some fine tweezers, you only need to get the chip close to the right spot. Then once the hot plate does its magic, the solder itself will pull the chip into place. Morten repeated this process five times, and the chip was aligned correctly with good electrical connections in each case.
After getting the hardware all squared away, Morten fired up Code Composer Studio IDE to write a couple test programs. The first, naturally, just blinked an LED on and off. The other program powered a small thermostat that reads temperature and humidity measurements from a sensor and displays them on an alphanumeric display. A LaunchPad programmer was used to flash the firmware to the chip.
Be sure to check out the video for some tips and tricks if you want your own development board sporting the world’s smallest microcontroller — whether for a practical purpose or simply for bragging rights. You can also read up on everything the MSPM0C1104 has to offer on the product information page.
