The openMSP430 documentation states that GPIO is only for FPGA implementation, meaning “The external peripherals labeled with the "FPGA ONLY" tag do not contain any clock gate nor clock muxes and are clocked with MCLK only.” Which if I understand correctly means that it should still work fine, just there is no low power mode correct?

Also we are looking to add non-volatile storage to the system (COTS chip or SD card) and were looking into what bus on the openMSP could support it. It seems like the openMSP430 doesn’t support USART or USI and by extension SPI, so I was wondering if you had any insight into how to connect external NAND flash storage?

hi Prajwal,

Cool, I hope you are having fun with the core :-)

Regarding the GPIO you are completely right, the real limitation here is that the low power modes are not supported and that the block relies on a free running MCLK.
For the non-volatile memory, you would just need to implement a small peripheral supporting the protocol you want to use and then hook it to the peripheral bus.

Hope this helps,
Olivier