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MSP430

Authors:
Geoffrey Hunter
Geoffrey Hunter
Published On:
Dec 5, 2025
Last Updated:
Dec 12, 2025

The MSP430 is a popular family of microcontrollers manufactured by Texas Instruments. They were first introduced in 1992 and had a strong focus on ultra low-power operation.1. One stated average consumption is 4.2 nW per instruction, leading to average current consumptions less than 1 uA.2 Assuming a typical CR2032 lithium coin cell battery of 220mAh, this would be a runtime of about 30 years (ignoring battery self-discharge and other factors).

The MSP430 family has it’s own 16-bit RISC CPU architecture (i.e. it does not use a 3rd party CPU architecture from a company such as ARM).

Firmware for the MSP430 can be developed in TI’s own Code Composer Studio (CCS) IDE. A number of other IDEs also support the MSP430, including IAR and Energia (a port of Arduino to the MSP430 architecture).

The MSP430 Bootloader (BSL)

The MSP430 has a bootloader provided by TI called the BSL (the acronym comes from it’s former name, the Boot Strap Loader).3 The BSL is burnt into read-only memory in most (but not all!) of the MSP430 range of microcontrollers. It is not available in the F20xx, G2xx0, G2xx1, G2xx2, or I20xx family devices.4

A table summarising BSL support across the different MCUs in the MSP430 family.3

BSL supports a number of different transport layers, including UART (the most popular), I2C, SPI and USB.

The start the bootloader, a BSL entry sequence must be applied to dedicated pins. After that, a synchronization character followed by a data frame is used to communicate with the bootloader. The synchronization character (SYNC) is 0x80. The bootloader uses this to calculate internal timing parameters. BSL sends back DATA_ACK = 0x90 to acknowledge the SYNC3

Footnotes

  1. Stephen Evanczuk (2013, Aug 20). Slideshow: The most-popular MCUs ever. Electronic Design Network (EDN). Retrieved 2025-12-08, from https://www.edn.com/slideshow-the-most-popular-mcus-ever/. ↩

  2. Texas Instruments. MSP430 Microcontroller Family. Retrieved 2025-12-12, from https://www.ti.com/sc/data/msp/databook/chp1.pdf. ↩

  3. Texas Instruments (2010, Jul). User’s Guide - MSP430 Flash Devices Bootloader (BSL). Retrieved 2025-12-05, from https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/slau319af/slau319af.pdf. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Wikipedia (2025, Nov 11). TI MSP430 [wiki]. Retrieved 2025-12-08, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430. ↩