It’s generally pretty easy to spot a microcontroller on a PCB. There are clues aplenty: the more-or-less central location, the nearby crystal oscillator, the maze of supporting passives, and perhaps even an obvious flash chip lurking about. The dead giveaway, though, is all those traces leading to the chip, betraying its primacy in the circuit. As all roads lead to Rome, so it often is with microcontrollers.
It looks like that may be about to change, though, based on Texas Instruments’ recent announcement of a line of incredibly small Arm-based microcontrollers. The video below shows off just how small the MSPM0 line can be, ranging from a relatively gigantic TSSOP-20 case down to an eight-pin BGA package that measures only 1.6 mm by 0.86 mm. That’s essentially the size of an 0603 SMD resistor, a tiny footprint for a 24-MHz Cortex M0+ MCU with 16-kB of flash, 1-kB of SRAM, and a 12-bit ADC. The larger packages obviously have more GPIO brought out to pins, but even the eight-pin versions support six IO lines.
Of course, it’s hard not to write about a specific product without sounding like you’re shilling for the company, but being first to market with an MCU in this size range is certainly newsworthy. We’re sure other manufacturers will follow suit soon enough, but for now, we want to know how you would go about using a microcontroller the size of a resistor. The promo video hints at TI’s target market for these or compact wearables by showing them used in earbuds, but we suspect the Hackaday community will come up with all sorts of creative and fun ways to put these to use — shoutout to [mitxela], whose habit of building impossibly small electronic jewelry might be a good use case for something like this.
There may even be some nefarious use cases for a microcontroller this small. We were skeptical of the story about “spy chips” on PC motherboards, but a microcontroller that can pass for an SMD resistor might change that equation a bit. There’s also the concept of “Oreo construction” that these chips might make a lot easier. A board with a microcontroller embedded within it could be a real security risk, but on the other hand, it could make for some very interesting applications.
What’s your take on this? Can you think of applications where something this small is enabling? Or are microcontrollers that are likely to join the dust motes at the back of your bench after a poorly timed sneeze a bridge too far? Sound off in the comments below.
Is it marked Not for rectal use? If not, I have an idea 😛
Probably about the same stuff I did with an Atmel 2313 almost 25 years ago, except it would be smaller and not have a resonator and have fewer external ICs and consume less power and…
Although I do doubt my ability to put this on a PCB to do a reflow.
Plug-A-Day goes brrr.
Smaller, less detectable chess cheating devices. Just think of possibilities for younger players to finally beat Magnus!
Boofing BGA’s gives a new meaning to the term ‘anal beads’.
Put it in a ring to respond to RFID as a security key. Keep your (security) keyring on an actual ring that you would normally wear, such as a wedding ring or class ring.
I couldn’t find the power requirements info quickly from the datasheet, but you might be able to power it from skin temperature using the Seebeck effect.
Then maybe add a sensor or two, wake up every minute and measure body temperature or oxygenation or something. An automated reader in the home would make the whole operation seamless – such as a reader embedded into a doorway that you have to pass through.
From page #1: “RUN: 87µA/MHz”. Given it runs at 24MHz it would run at 2,088uA (or about 2mA) in the active state.
What is really interesting to me is how low the low power states are. “STANDBY: 5µA with SRAM retention”. If you can store even a little bit of power, you can wake up in bursts and last a long time on very little capacity. This would pair well with energy harvesting devices.
Unfortunately spo2 and in general optical front ends require 25mA+ at tmyour desired sampling frequency (32 to 3200sps, with led on periods of about 60 to 400us). Doubt you’ll be powering anything with Seebeck :(
Oh man now that’s one of those ‘I wish I thought of that’ ideas. A small amount of ‘I must never lose this’ storage. Trouble, I suppose, is getting the info on/off the thing while being robust as a ring, and not looking janky.
I like the class ring idea. Something that hefty would give you a fair amount of internal volume to work with for support components.
“World’s Smallest Microcontroller?”
Not even close. NY8A051H 497×418µm
That’s just the raw die size. Based on its datasheet, the NY8A051H is only available in SOP-8 and SOT-23-6, which are much larger.
Die was available to buy from LCSC few months ago.
Interesting. Not trying to disagree with you but the datasheet I found only mentions the two packaging formats Adrian mentioned. Do you have a link to something showing this chip in the smaller format?
The Ti chip seems nicer in that it’s a 32-bit ARM MCU, but I’ll grant I haven’t really worked with 8-bit since the 6502.
https://www.nyquest.com.tw/upload/2024_11_293/NY8A051H_v1.8.pdf
Ordering Information -> Package Type -> Die
Die version is used for chip-on-board (COB) mounting. The silicon die is glued to the PCB and connected with bond wires, then covered by a blob of epoxy. It uses significantly more area than just the bare die size. But still much smaller than conventional packaging.
UFO implants, finally!
Wouldn’t that make it Too Hot To Handle?
That comment hit Rock Bottom…
I think most people would notice the large needle.
loose it on the floor
No one’s said the obvious, pair with the world’s smallest violin.
The world’s tiniest synth keyboard.
lose
I would use it to store me plans to take over da world!
“Gee, Brain, but where would we get uniforms that small?
NARF!”
Well Futurists might get their world of ubiquitous computers in the most banal of places.
I want silicon cheap enough space heaters preform compute instead of using nichrome wire.
When it gets cold in my office, I just fire up a couple more computers. If it’s still cold, I mine some coins.
The ADC is probably the most interesting thing to me. If they’re cheap enough, you could throw one of these at whatever you want to sample (depending on all the usual ADC considerations, of course). It looks like its I2C peripheral even has a follower mode (not always a given in MCUs), so bam, you have a bus full of serial ADCs with short analog traces, extra filtering logic, etc. One of the ADCs is also a temp sensor, which would have been extremely useful in a thermography product I worked on a few years back.
I’m thinking back to one of my first design projects out of college. My employer had an existing design built around a single TTL Hex inverter IC. I was tasked with keeping the same PCB size but squeezing an MSP-430 in there and programming it to tolerate less precise pulse times and to log how many times it had been signaled in its lifetime.
This thing would have made that trivial.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these. At $0.20, it makes sense to use it as dedicated high speed spi adc, with one module per each channel. Like a universal sensor driver with some serious protocol to communicate to main big chip. Imagine 24 of them connected to rpi2040 for eeg cap, slurping 24 channels of analog data.
Smart networks and AI. By pushing processing closer to the sensor(s).
That’s…. not a beowulf cluster.
That’s just device / perfrerial design structure. Commonly used these days, and yes a chip like this could be used if space was a constraint on the device side.
Cloud computing. Specifically, DUST cloud.
Endless Space here we come.
How fast do you need to measure it? Will you run out of bandwidth on the SPI bus?
With such processing power you could even use some compression and send many samples in one packet if latency is not essential.
Obviously a blinky led FOR ANTS!
Might be a fantastic mini-core for small fpgas like the ice40up5k. Just have a small bank of these attached that the fpga could off load small processing tasks instead of tiny softcores taking up flip-flops and bram.
Wow that is a SICK idea.
I’d like to start implanting them in my body somewhere. Maybe parts of my brain that aren’t used very often.
I was going to say I’d need a lot of them to replace all the brain I don’t use, but then I remembered I don’t have much brain to start with, so I’d only need a few to do the job.
Clearly the answer is a Beowulf Cluster for ants.
I think size by itself is pretty boring.
The use cases shown have been done for a long time now.
Take the earbud: The BLE still needs to be solved and there is probably dedicated hardware for noise cancelation, that can not be addressed with a 24MHz micro. Then either the BLE solution or the Audio dsp will give you a CPU for free, it’s already on one of the dies somewhere.
If the power consumption was incredible, compared to larger devices, that would be nice, but the video did not say that.
The earbuds thing does feel like a stretch. Earbuds these days are often using purpose built ICs or are going to tapeout.
Put the µC in an optical package, along with some LEDs (R, G, B, IR) and a photo diode.
Basically make a hackabe WS2812 that is also capable of optical communication / can act as a sensor pixel / have its own peripehrals.
Winning answer!
Wikipedia’s page on “smart dust” has a bunch of ideas, from as far back as the early 1990s. Power and wireless communication (and sufficient power for wireless communcation) are still going to be tricky, but there are some technologies to explore.
Personally I’m hoping for a radio-controlled bumblebee. Or maybe start with a dragonfly.
How about a cockroach? https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach
Hide the MCU under one of those larger resistors… would be nice if the modified resistor was functional as well.
I think that’s alluded to in the writeup about embedding it in the board. You could put this underneath a 555 and someone looking at it would not be likely to see it.
(“You’ll never believe what you can do with just a 555!”)
ADC and LINbus suggests some kind of sensor array. But what needs to be that tiny? Maybe an EEG for a brain interface in a hat or helmet. Like a motorcycle where you could activate lights with a thought.
I want a swarm of wasp drones. The central hive/cluster is not just their storage, but also charging, and the central gathering point all their data is sent to before it goes to the rest of the network.
World’s smallest TI-83?
Obviously I’d immediately eat one
I would use up all the IPv6 addresses.
I recently used spider style attiny85 to drive 10 rgb led strip for replacement lightbar for sgi octane, this would work too, but maybe not because soldering would be a nightmare. ;-)
I would drop it on the floor and lose it, obviously, why are you asking?
The size isn’t THAT unprecedented. NXP’s LPC1103 (32k flash, 8k RAM, 16pins, 2.17×2.32mm) came out a decade ago. Yeah, this is less than half that size, but we’re in the realm of diminishing returns WRT “new applications.” I think.
5.03mm² vs 1.38mm², thats closer to quarter of the size. .5mm vs .35mm ball pitch is somewhat significant difference. And this new TI part is also almost half the height, .35mm vs .6mm.
That being said, .35mm pitch wlcsp is not all that exotic (MAX32660 would be better comparison point), but doing that for 8 pin chip is novel
Let’s say STM32C011D6, then – comes in WLCSP 12 1.7×1.42×0.6 P 0.35 mm. That’s more like 1:2 sizewise. But with 1.5x more pins.
I would have to add a programming header that was 5x the size of the IC.
And then a battery…
I think you nailed it. There is no eco system that goes with this part. Anything to makes it useful will be so much bigger.
Oh, it is. You have dev boards for the development process, and in a final product you would buy it pre-programmed.
When they are used as clusters, nearby or distributed, the size you describe is already there. Anyway, a new ecosystem of smaller connections would make it shine.
I remember TI advertising a 25 cent processor a while back. That was at 1 million quantity. I think they are doing the same saying this is a 20 cent processor you will pay 3 times that at 1000 pcs. False advertising.
Click the link in the article and then scroll down and click “buy now”. $0.18 in 1000 quantity.
I worked on a product that had a 3mm wide double sided fpc and a bunch of sensors. The MCU I used was smaller than the IMU but this TI part would have made love much easier. Really small MCUs are driven by mechanical design rather than electrical
I would probably manage to short all of the pins together while attempting to solder it. I have no desire to work with anything smaller than a 0.5mm pin pitch.
It needs to be deadbug integrated into a blinken lights circuit. Comically proportioned next to the normal leds etc..
I made a sound-reactive LED necklace out of an ATTiny85 years and years ago. Could probably make it earring-sized with that guy.
World’s smallest microcontroller?
“10-cent WCH CH570/CH572 RISC-V MCU features 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth LE 5.0, USB 2.0”.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/03/15/10-cents-wch-ch570-ch572-risc-v-mcu-features-2-4ghz-wireless-bluetooth-le-5-0-usb-2-0/
Quite a lot smaller 1.38 mm² vs 9 mm² of the WCH.
On paper the MSPM0C1104 looks like a good replacement for the ATTiny85. The first project that comes to mind is elm-chan’s Simple SD Audio Player. But with that tiny DSBGA you could glue it directly onto an SD micro card with some tiny caps, inductors, and a tiny power ic. Three stiff bent wires glued on to the other side could be made into a pseudo headphone jack. Then power is just whatever the power ic can handle. A single AA battery would probably last all day. Really tiny music player. Not sure how you’d access the SD afterwards though.
I think we’re getting close to things a little smaller than a grain of rice, with induction power and an outside that’s multicolor OLED and some data flow over the induction, and capacitance touch sensor, maybe a inertial sensor that knows how it’s oriented… And then put it in transparent PLA reels with a 3D printer that has a nozzle but enough to let them flow.
Kinda grainy prints, but you’ve now got the ability to print some very neat toys.
6 i/o pins? Build a huge isometric grid of them and have them run a nano OS to run jobs such that they flow through the mesh like a graph based processing pipeline with configurable parallelism?
Hmm. The Transputer only used four links to neighbours, and ran at 20 MHz.
I wonder how this would compare in the same sort of arrangement.
16k is a bit limiting but – USB encrypter?
Place it in a small cable, plug in USB drive, data is encrypted. Key held in CPU flash.
Need the same cable (or the key) to decrypt USB contents.
A USB phy likely uses the same area as the chip here itself lol
I guess I can make the world’s first 0402 smart resistor lol
Hide it under a 1206 and claim my circuit is only using a 555.
What about ESD issues?
MSP430 would make more sense with low power.
DOOM.
Run Doom on a cufflink?
The ch32v riscv series is a better choice. 1K pricing of the TI part indicates low volume pricing to HI. Also 1k sram, come on already.
Put 32 (or 64) on an Arduino Uno form factor board and do massive parallel processing.
Just because.
Build a tiny Connection Machine
Might want one of the higher I/O packages for that application.
Ultra light weight mouse
control the worlds smallest micro, I would expect.
I mean, couple this with some small enough motors, linear actuators, and a 3D printed model could result in a very good Gundam Mobile suit that actually moves. Hmm…
I’d lose it during unpacking, never to find it again. That’s pretty much what I would do with it
How much is a kilogram of these?
Gotta feed the pidgeons in the park.
Color changing nail extensions with screen printed battery. Hmm..