A SMALL WONDER - ON YOUR FINGERTIP
- prateetisengupta
- Apr 26
- 3 min read
“To see a world in a grain of sand …
And eternity in an hour.”
- William Blake, ‘Auguries Of Innocence’, 1863
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), headquartered in Dallas, Texas, has recently expanded the MSPM0 Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU family with the MSPM0C1104 - the world’s smallest microcontroller. It is a machine that measures just 1.38mm2 in its WCSP package, roughly matching a flake of black pepper.
The MSPM0C1104, equipped with a 32-bit processor running at 24 MHz, 1KB of memory,16KB of flash storage, a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter and a lot of other features (more technical details at the links below for interested readers), is optimized for space-constrained applications such as smart sensors, and other small electronics, like health monitors, industrial sensors, or smart tags that run for years on a coin cell battery. Its power usage is minimal, and this makes it ideal for tiny devices that need to last a long time on small batteries. It is also built to handle extreme conditions, working in temperatures from –40°C to 125°C.
All this for only US $0.20 in 1,000-unit quantities.
Its powerful features and capabilities notwithstanding, what makes it so remarkable is its size: it is like a full-fledged computer running on, if not a speck of sand, but at least a grain of rice.
It is, no doubt, a common trope to compare the huge, unwieldy machines of the early 20th century like the ENIAC and EDVAC that once occupied entire rooms, to the latest smart devices that far outnumber the total population of the world - just to remind ourselves how far we have come. However, considering the mammoth infrastructure and computing power currently needed to mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, or train LLMs like Grok 3, one might just wonder whether some day in the not-so-distant future, AI tools could be hosted on handheld devices powered by such minuscule hardware components.
Perhaps we will have a new version of Grok that will emulate the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mk II, which according to the author of the beloved sci-fi classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Douglas Noel Adams, is the “single most astounding thing of any kind ever”.
The Guide Mk II, as Adams tells us, is a black, circular object about the size of a side plate. Its top and bottom are smoothly convex, and it resembles a lightweight throwing discus. Most importantly, there is a single word printed on it, in "small, alarming" letters. That word is:
“Panic”.
Douglas Adams wanted to be a nuclear physicist but by his own admission, “never made it because my arithmetic was so bad”. Consequently, he went to Cambridge to study English. Anyone who has read “The Hitchhiker”, will agree that he would have made a brilliant theoretical physicist.
On the other hand, William Blake was a visionary who was centuries ahead of his time, and some of his poems read like eerie prophecies. More so after we split the atom and released a whole new Pandora’s Box on the world in the process.
Both of them, I think, would have appreciated the powers of the MSPM0C1104 microcontroller.
So, impossible as it may sound, is it too presumptuous to dream of a probable future where scientists and engineers develop an AI tool with the power to auto-calibrate its look and feel, adjust its data channels and processing speed, modulate its audio and video streams – all at a single gesture from the user? Perhaps it will be able to go through mindboggling transformations of shape, color, and extent (at the speed of light no less), move back and forth in space and time, and generally operate in infinite dimensional matrices with the ease and elegance of a prima ballerina!
Sounds like black magic, doesn’t it? But if a time traveler from 2025 were to tell Charles Babbage about the MSPM0C1104, he would have thought the same.
As Aristotle puts it so aptly in his Poetics, “a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.”
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