The World’s Smallest Microcontroller

Whether you are designing a commercial electronic device or hacking away at a personal project on the weekends, chances are good that your bill of materials includes at least one microcontroller. With thousands of powerful, inexpensive options on the market, the requirements of most applications could be fulfilled by dozens of different chips. With price, performance, and energy consumption being roughly the same in so many cases, developers often make their purchasing decision based on factors other than differences in the hardware specs, like their familiarity with the development toolchains.

However, every so often a new chip comes along with a real differentiator. Texas Instruments’ new microcontroller, the MSPM0C1104, is one such example. While this chip is powerful and does have plenty of options for communicating with other devices, there is nothing about these features that is exactly going to knock your socks off. But when it comes to size, the MSPM0C1104 is like no other — literally. At just 1.38 square millimeters, it is about the size of a black pepper flake, which makes it the smallest microcontroller in the world.

The diminutive size of this chip makes it a desirable platform for use in everything from electric toothbrushes to wearable electronics and medical devices. After all, no one has ever bought a pair of wireless earbuds, then complained that they simply were not cumbersome enough to use because of their lack of excessive bulk. We like electronics to transparently fit into our lives, and it is small components such as the MSPM0C1104 that make that possible.

The team at Texas Instruments has managed to fit an Arm Cortex-M0+ core into their 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. Full details can be found on the product information page.

If you could use a little more breathing room in your product designs, the MSPM0C1104 might be worth checking out. At 38% smaller than the industry's next smallest microcontroller, it is likely to stand in a class of its own for some time to come. Prices start at $0.16 in 1,000-unit quantities.