MSP430
The MSP430 is a microcontroller family from Texas Instruments. Built around a modern 16-bit RISC CPU, the MSP430 is a high performance device designed for ultra low power consumption.
The device comes in a variety of configurations featuring the usual peripherals: 10/12/14-bit ADCs, comparators, timers, USART, LCD driver, watchdog, HW multiplier, internal oscillator, etc. Apart from some older EEPROM (MSP430C3xx) and high volume OTP versions, all of the devices are in-circuit programmable via JTAG or BSL (Boot Strap Loader via RS-232 link).
Texas Instruments provides software development tools that can be downloaded for free. The tools have a crippled compiler that limits the number of lines that can be compiled. However, the provided assembler is free of any limits. The open source community produces a freely available software development toolset () based on the GNU toolset. Also various commercial development toolsets, which include editor, compiler, linker, assembler, debugger and in single cases code wizards, are available.
