You write program(usually in C), compile it into machine code(to .hex or .bin file), then "flashing" it using debugger tool. This IC will execute your program.
It's not intended for a normal person to use. If you're a normal person making something as a hobby project, you'll get a much nicer development experience by using a microcontroller that costs a few dollars rather than a few cents. For hobby purposes, I recommend either the Raspberry Pi Pico or the STM32 blue pill. A part like this is intended for inexpensive, high-volume consumer electronics that need some sort of simple control functionality. For example, let's say you're making an electric toothbrush. All it needs to do is turn the motor on, wait for 2 minutes, then pulse the motor to let the user know they're done brushing their teeth. This can do that. Or let's say you're making a promotional keychain, and you want it to blink a few LEDs in a specific pattern when the user presses a button. This can do that. If you take apart basically any piece of cheap (< $5) electronics that's been designed in the past 10-15 years, you'll usually see a tiny unmarked 8-pin microcontroller doing the control work. This part competes in that market.
Anyone using these small chips for hobbyist purposes probably should look at the more fully featured MSPM0-L line or MSPM0-G lines. Still Cortex-M0+ and in the sub $2 market... But hobbyists probably don't see much cost benefit below that (how many MCUs are you buying anyway??).
The L line and G lines have better ADCs, Comparators, better connectivity, and some of them even have on board OpAmps.
Tiny chips have a use of you are tying to build the absolute smallest devices. But hobbyists don't have the equipment to comfortably build things of this size.
Sizing up to VQFN packages and 0603 passives makes more sense for the typical hobbyist.
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As far as how a professional would use this, there are plenty of good uses of chips inside of cables or other kinds of smarts. Like a chip controlling a bunch of LEDs for example, based on voltage measurements elsewhere (there is a 12-bit ADC after all, which means you have rather solid voltage sensing from a few pins).
Basic voltage comparisons + math + crude timer and then a few pins for in/out gets you to a lot of useful projects. Albeit dumb ones. I dunno why anything needs to be this small in particular though.
A silly question (from a non-HW guy). Why are digital bathroom scales so coarse? Some have a weight resolution of +/- 500 grams. Would a better microcontroller make a weight faster or more presise? I guess this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale.
I used to have a bathroom scale with a single strain gauge that was accurate. Accurate, as in weigh yourself, pick up a 1lb object, weigh yourself again and see an extra pound. That scale had a "lifetime" nonreplaceable battery in it and after 20 years or so, gave up the ghost.
Every scale I've tried since is wildly inaccurate, and they do have brains and they fake it. Step on, get a random weight within a 5lb range of the true weight. Step on repeatedly, even after the scale has timed out and had to be rezeroed, and get that exact weight again. Fake. Everysingle 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.
I've since found another relatively vintage single strain gauge scale whose battery still works. And I have a mechanical scale in reserve for when it no longer does.
Analog to digital converters (components generally built-in to uCs and SoCs but you can make them using simple resistor ladders) have common resolution ranging usually from 8bit to 24bit in most consumer hardware.
Resolution of +/- 500g just means there's not enough "steps" values in your ADCs provided bit depth: for example the 10bits on an attiny85 gives you 1024 discreet values you can map to weight values etc.
At $0.20 in 1k quantities, this is TI's answer to the CH32V003, Puya PY32, and the STM32C0 series. It's great to see tier-1 silicon vendors participating in the race to the bottom for jellybean microcontrollers.
The 1KB of SRAM is admittedly very tight (even WCH's 10-cent RISC-V parts usually give you 2KB), so you are strictly in bare-metal, carefully-managing-your-stack territory.
This line of micros has been out for almost 2 years now but they only just took the 1.38mm^2 package out of pre-production.
I started a design last year of a tiny earring with ~102 addressable LEDs on it, a microphone, a bunch of supporting circuitry and this micro.
https://i.ibb.co/JWh57LLw/IMG-20260408-183807502-HDR.jpg
Unfortunately by the time I was ready to order the boards I found the tiny package was unobtanium and had to resort to the second smallest package which isn't very small. Frustration!
My sleeper pick for a design like this was JL700N series. Intended for cheap TWS, ultra high integration. 3x3mm QFN20 package, and in it: BLE, USB, can be powered off 5v or 3.3v, built in battery support complete with a charger, almost no passives required. SDK was a bitch though.
There are more pieces like this in "wearables" market now, things like "SmartBond" series. But for a while, weird off-label pieces like this wore the integration crown.
The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.
I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadThis specific SKU has serious limitations due to the SRAM - TI limits the features (ROM bootloader IIRC, etc.) severely on these due to this.
The L line and G lines have better ADCs, Comparators, better connectivity, and some of them even have on board OpAmps.
Tiny chips have a use of you are tying to build the absolute smallest devices. But hobbyists don't have the equipment to comfortably build things of this size.
Sizing up to VQFN packages and 0603 passives makes more sense for the typical hobbyist.
-----------
As far as how a professional would use this, there are plenty of good uses of chips inside of cables or other kinds of smarts. Like a chip controlling a bunch of LEDs for example, based on voltage measurements elsewhere (there is a 12-bit ADC after all, which means you have rather solid voltage sensing from a few pins).
Basic voltage comparisons + math + crude timer and then a few pins for in/out gets you to a lot of useful projects. Albeit dumb ones. I dunno why anything needs to be this small in particular though.
If you had 1024 of these, you'd have a grand total of 1 MiB of RAM. You won't be compute clustering much with 1 MiB of RAM.
Every scale I've tried since is wildly inaccurate, and they do have brains and they fake it. Step on, get a random weight within a 5lb range of the true weight. Step on repeatedly, even after the scale has timed out and had to be rezeroed, and get that exact weight again. Fake. Every single 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.
I've since found another relatively vintage single strain gauge scale whose battery still works. And I have a mechanical scale in reserve for when it no longer does.
Resolution of +/- 500g just means there's not enough "steps" values in your ADCs provided bit depth: for example the 10bits on an attiny85 gives you 1024 discreet values you can map to weight values etc.
I have no grasp of even the magnitude of the price for something like this.
The 1KB of SRAM is admittedly very tight (even WCH's 10-cent RISC-V parts usually give you 2KB), so you are strictly in bare-metal, carefully-managing-your-stack territory.
Not worth changing the design now...
There are more pieces like this in "wearables" market now, things like "SmartBond" series. But for a while, weird off-label pieces like this wore the integration crown.
It will be much better if the OP link to the announcement news rather than straight to the datasheet for better context.
[1] TI introduces the world's smallest MCU, enabling innovation in the tiniest of applications:
https://www.ti.com/about-ti/newsroom/news-releases/2025/2025...
The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102
The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.
I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.