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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, October 29, 2009

TI, ARM and MSP

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This week, I spent some time hearing the message from Texas Instruments on the progression of their ARM-based embedded processor line – some of the main news items from that, I have already posted here. There has been a sudden surge of ARM-related announcements in the last week, because several licensees used the occasion of the ARM TechCon in Santa Clara to introduce product updates. Or, in the case of a startup I’ve also reported on (Energy Micro, here), to introduce their first product. (Go to our home page/ design centres/ processors to locate a few others.)
That announcement, and some others, led me to pose a question to TI; now that Energy Micro has demonstrated that you can do a very-low-power, Cortex-M3-based microcontroller – with a 32-bit core – what’s the future for your ultra-low-power processor line, MSP430? You (TI) are pushing the message of a harmonised, scalable ARM-based product line; and it uses a core from ARM who, have made a business out of saying, among other things, “Don’t bother with that 8- and 16-bit stuff any more, what you need is a proper 32-bit cpu.” (I paraphrase) – so will you be continuing with MSP430?
If you’re designing with MSP you might have wondered the same thing, so here’s their answer, direct from CMO Jean Anne Booth; she says that TI remains committed to, and will continue to invest in, MSP430, as well as producing (future, unspecified) lower-power Stellaris (Cortex-M3-based) chips. Apparently, according to Jean Anne, you embedded designers out there fall into two main categories when you are looking for a processor architecture for a new project. Either you’ve bought into a particular architecture, have time and money invested in software and hardware IP for it, and will only depart from it under extreme duress; or, you’ll look at anything at all that has the potential to solve your problem. (Do you recognise yourself in this snapshot?)
Booth assures me that TI views both ARM and MSP 430 as having relevance to both these positions; MSP has users that are heavily invested; and it has competitive things to offer the ultra-low-power-system designer. So there you have it – if that question was in your mind.
Separately to that, one thing that has become apparent to me through hearing many recent pitches on low-power micro design is the critical need to analyse the problem in the light of the duty cycle of your application; what needs to be switched on, when and for how long. The assumptions that the various vendors make in this respect, when setting up their claims for diminutive power consumption, warrant careful scrutiny.

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

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