this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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MICROCONTROLLERS

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[–] dragontamer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The MSPM0-line has some of the most impressive specs for a below $1 microcontroller I've ever seen. And at $0.53 (qty 1k), this is very well below $1.

I'm definitely intrigued by this part, though I don't know when I'll have the time to try out a new microcontroller line and learn it. Still, the specs and its price point are incredibly impressive.


The 2x chopper/zero drift OpAmps are among the more impressive parts they've fit here. 6MHz bandwidth-gain is meh, but zero-drift is more about low offset voltage (the + and - pins on an OpAmp are supposed to have 0V difference between them. But in practice, OpAmps have a non-zero voltage here. That's the offset voltage and you use chopper-opamps to minimize this error specifically).

The venerable lm358 OpAmp (a common sub-$1 opamp from Ti) has 4mV of worst-case offset voltage. (This is a general-purpose amplifier though, not a chopper. Just picking a "typical opamp" to compare against)

This freebie OpAmp you get from this 50-cent microcontroller? 0.5mV of worst-case offset voltage, with a "typical" specification claiming 0.1mV offset voltage.

I've definitely seen better chopper/zero-drift OpAmps than this, but not at the sub-50 cent level and certainly not "for free" with a digital microcontroller running along side it.

The 3rd "GPAMP" is kind of terrible though. But a terrible OpAmp is still better than no op-amp at all.