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.
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.
“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.
UFO implants, finally!
Wouldn’t that make it Too Hot To Handle?
That comment hit Rock Bottom…
loose it on the floor
No one’s said the obvious, pair with the world’s smallest violin.
lose
I would use it to store me plans to take over da world!
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.
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.
How fast do you need to measure it? Will you run out of bandwidth on the SPI bus?
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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/
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.
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.
I guess I can make the world’s first 0402 smart resistor lol