Date: 29/03/2010

16-bit MCU from TI for LED lanterns

Texas Instruments sees big opportunity in India's LED lighting market. It has lined up range of white LED driver ICs specifically for LED lamps. Along with the LED driver ICs, TI also supports designers with reference design cookbook for designing LED lanterns and other such LED lighting systems.

But to make the LED lantern more intelligent and power-efficient, a low power MCU is required. TI has made available a 16 bit low power MCU suitable for controlling LED lantern. The new MSP430 16 bit MCUs are priced at approximate Rupees 12 (25 Cents) to compete with low cost 8-bit microcontrollers.

TI claims this family will gives 8-bit developers up to 10X performance and 10X battery life. This family with a roadmap of 100 new MCUs also serves broad range of applications, including safety, security and touch sense.


Mr. Shailesh Thakurdesai, Business Development Manager, Microcontrollers, Texas Instruments India said, "In India, this series of devices has the potential to cater to a wide range of applications including LED lanterns, panel meters, consumer appliances and personal healthcare products".

Other key features of this family are:
16 MIPS operation, and 50 percent greater code density over other low cost 8-bit MCU solutions
Five power modes with low standby power of 0.4 microamps and <1 microseconds
Integrated intelligent peripherals, such as 10-bit ADCs, UART, comparator and serial communication, offload CPU tasks for increased power efficiency

First 27 MSP430G2xxx devices are immediately available to order and include up to 2KB Flash and 128B RAM and future devices will include up to 16KB Flash and 512B RAM

The next version in the roadmap are MSP430G2xxx MCUs with integrated capacitive sense optimized I/Os to enable low cost touch pad implementations.

For more details visit www.ti.com