World's smallest microcontroller looks like I could easily accidentally inhale it but packs a genuine 32-bit Arm CPU
If you thought the Raspberry Pi's chip was dinky, well, get a load of the nattily named Texas Instruments MSPM0C1104, said to the world's smallest microcontroller or MCU and measuring a mere 1.38 mm².
If you look carefully at the image above, you can just make out the eight ball-grid connectors on the tiny 1.38 mm² chip package. In other words, that almost-invisible thing isn't just the silicon chip, but the entire chip package equivalent to a fully packaged CPU from Intel or AMD, not just the silicon inside. Yup, mind veritably blown.
For reference, the package for the Broadcom BCM2712 chip that powers the Raspberry Pi 5 is about 20 mm². So you could fit about 200 of these things in the space the Broadcom BCM2712 takes up.
Despite the diminutive proportions, which Texas Instruments claims to be 38% smaller than any other MCU, this teensy spec of a chip packs a fully functional Arm 32-bit Cortex-M0+ CPU core running at a towering 24 MHz. It also has 16 KB of flash memory and 1 KB of SRAM.
In broad terms, that seems to put it about on par with an Intel 386 chip from 1985, which offered clock speeds from 12.5 MHz up to 40 MHz and 16 KB of L2 cache. Unfortunately, Texas Instruments doesn't quote a process node or transistor count, so it's a little hard to get an overall feel for the complexity level and performance of the chip.
Still, it also sports a 12-bit ADC or analogue-to-digital converter with three channels and it's listed on Texas Instruments' website as an automotive mixed-signal microcontroller but is designed for small systems like earbuds and medical devices.
"Consumers are continuously demanding that everyday electronic items, such as electric toothbrushes and stylus pens, offer more features in a smaller footprint at a lower cost," Texas Instruments says, and the MSPM0C1104 chip will help enable that.
Oh, and the price? Yours for 20 cents, provided you buy a thousand of 'em. You can can also have a play with a fully featured dev-kit board for $6, complete with an exciting sounding 'Red LED' and versatile 'User input button'. Will it run Doom? There's only one way to find out...
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