The Texas Instruments® MSP432® Peripheral Driver Library is a set of drivers for accessing the peripherals found on the MSP430 family of microcontrollers. While they are not drivers in the pure operating system sense (that is, they do not have a common interface and do not connect into a global device driver infrastructure), they do provide a mechanism that makes it easy to use the device's peripherals.

The capabilities and organization of the drivers are governed by the following design goals:

• They are written entirely in C except where absolutely not possible.
• They demonstrate how to use the peripheral in its common mode of operation.
• They are easy to understand.
• They are reasonably efficient in terms of memory and processor usage.
• They are as self-contained as possible.
• Where possible, computations that can be performed at compile time are done there instead of at run time.
• They can be built with more than one tool chain.

Some consequences of these design goals are:

• The drivers are not necessarily as efficient as they could be (from a code size and/or execution speed point of view). While the most efficient piece of code for operating a peripheral would be written in assembly and custom tailored to the specific requirements of the application, further size optimizations of the drivers would make them more difficult to understand.
• The drivers do not support the full capabilities of the hardware. Some of the peripherals provide complex capabilities which cannot be utilized by the drivers in this library, though the existing code can be used as a reference upon which to add support for the additional capabilities.
• The APIs have a means of removing all error checking code. Because the error checking is usually only useful during initial program development, it can be removed to improve code size and speed.

For many applications, the drivers can be used as is. But in some cases, the drivers will have to be enhanced or rewritten in order to meet the functionality, memory, or processing requirements of the application. If so, the existing driver can be used as a reference on how to operate the peripheral.

Each MSP430ware driverlib API takes in the base address of the corresponding peripheral as the first parameter. This base address is obtained from the msp430 device specific header files (or from the device datasheet). The example code for the various peripherals show how base address is used. When using CCS, the eclipse shortcut "Ctrl + Space" helps. Type __MSP430 and "Ctrl + Space", and the list of base addresses from the included device specific header files is listed.

The following tool chains are supported:

• IAR Embedded Workbench®
• Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio™