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 16 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 $160. TI is showing off this and other MCUs (not Marvel-related) at Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg, Germany.
