Texas Instruments says it has shrunk the size of the smallest microcontroller unit in its industry with a new MCU the size of a black pepper flake.
The MCU packaging is only 1.38 square millimeters in size and is part of the company’s Arm Cortex line of embedded designs. TI says the product is aimed at small products including medical wearables, earbuds, stylus pens and electric toothbrushes. The product includes a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter and has 16KB of flash memory and 1KB of SRAM and runs at 24MHz.
The diminutive device is known as the MSPM0C1104. Alas, that’s as catchy as it gets (no PepperPower for this piece of tech).
TI says the microcontroller costs 20 cents per unit in quantities of 1,000, which means a company could get an army of robot spiders project started for as little as $200. TI is showing off this and other MCUs (not Marvel-related) at Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg, Germany.
Opens up opportunities
William Luk, a consultant and technology expert at Quandary Peak Research, said the MCU shrinkage opens up opportunities in areas where miniature devices weren’t previously possible.
“One of the important verticals for micro-devices is in healthcare and surgical: smart pills, embedded sensors, or even surgical devices that can reach places like never before,” Luk said.
Luk also said the innovation may be enough to move Texas Instruments up the chain of MCU developers currently dominated by STMicroelectronics, Infineon, NXP, Microchip and Renesas Electronics.
“With the new TI MCU, we could see a new class of super micro-devices not just targeting consumers but commercial uses (such as healthcare). But there are also challenges such as government approval (for medical devices). Manufacturing of these new micro devices could also be challenging,” Luk said.
Correction, March 14: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the cost of the microcontroller. It costs 20 cents per unit.
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