Freescale Semiconductor is addressing today's miniaturization trend with its new Kinetis KL02 MCU - the world's smallest ARM Powered MCU.
The KL02 holds great potential for ultra-small-form-factor products in applications such as portable consumer devices, remote sensing nodes, wearable devices and ingestible healthcare sensing.
Measuring just 1.9 x 2.0 mm, the Kinetis KL02 MCU is 25 percent smaller than the next-smallest ARM MCU. Within this miniscule device, Freescale has included the latest 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, low-power functionality and a range of analog and communication peripherals. This enables system designers to reduce the size of their boards and products while retaining the performance, feature integration and power consumption characteristics of their end devices.
The Kinetis KL02 is a wafer-level chip-scale package (CSP) MCU. Freescale's CSP MCUs use the latest in package manufacturing technology to connect the die directly to the solder ball interconnects and, in turn, to the printed circuit board (PCB). This removes the need for bond wires or interposer connections, which minimizes die-to-PCB inductance and improves thermal conduction and package durability for physically harsh environments.
The KL02 delivers 15.9 CM/mA and it includes autonomous, power-smart peripherals (in this case, an ADC, UART and timer), 10 flexible power modes and wide clock and power gating to minimize power loss. A low-power boot mode reduces power spikes during the boot sequence or deep sleep wake-up. This is useful for systems in which battery chemistry limits the allowable peak current, such as those employing lithium-ion batteries frequently used in portable devices.
Kinetis KL02 MCU features include:
- 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ core, 1.71-3.6V operation
- Bit manipulation engine for faster, more code-efficient handling of peripheral registers
- 32 KB flash memory, 4 KB RAM
- High-speed 12-bit analog-to-digital converter
- High-speed analog comparator
- Low-power UART, SPI, 2x IICI2C
- Powerful timers for a broad range of applications including motor control
- -40 °C to +85 °C operation