Electronic – What are the RAM-only microcontrollers intended for

microcontroller

While looking for some detailing on part number construction for Texas Instruments's MSP430 series, I came across this wiki page: TI MSP430

There is a statement,

"L" as in the MSP430L09x series, which indicates a RAM-only part; it must remain continuously powered to retain its programming

While I haven't able to validate the above after going through the datasheet on the official website, the question that bumps me is, if at all there is one such part, what could be the appropriate application to use it?

Best Answer

The point of the "L" series is to support very low supply voltages (0.9 V; what you'd get from a single battery cell); the web page says:

Typical applications for this device include single-cell systems requiring a full analog signal chain.

The missing flash is not a goal; it's an unfortunate side effect of the voltage range. Chapter 8 of the User's Guide says:

This chapter describes how the MSP430L092 loader code is used to build an autonomous microcontroller solution. The loader approach is chosen as nonvolatile memory is not available for native ultra-low supply voltages.

You are supposed to ask TI to create a chip with your code in ROM (this is what the "C" series is for). However, during development (when you do not yet know what goes into the ROM), or when you do not have many devices (so the fixed ROM overhead would be too expensive), you have to use an "L" chip without ROM:

MSP430x09x debugging scenarios

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