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It looks like they mostly drove the price down by reducing functionality. There are no "fancy" interfaces like UART or i2c. There's only 64 bytes of RAM. The ch
by nfriedly 6y ago
It looks like they mostly drove the price down by reducing functionality. There are no "fancy" interfaces like UART or i2c. There's only 64 bytes of RAM. The chips are one-time programmable which is cheaper than flash memory, and there's only 512 bytes of program space. The CPU is pretty limited too - it doesn't even have an instruction to multiply two numbers. There's no debugging interface on the chip, instead you buy a simulator device that behaves like the chip, but has reprogrammable memory and a debugging interface.
It all adds up, or in this case it doesn't, and what's left is a pretty inexpensive chip.