2 ms·
WCH sells a ton of general purpose microcontrollers and microcontrollers disguised as single purpose peripheral chips. For example all USB to UART chips are 805
by rasz 4y ago
WCH sells a ton of general purpose microcontrollers and microcontrollers disguised as single purpose peripheral chips. For example all USB to UART chips are 8051 inside. Same for "USB Controllers" like CH375 http://www.wch-ic.com/products/categories/63.html?pid=1 http://www.wch-ic.com/products/categories/63.html?pid=1 used in https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_USB_Adapter https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_USB_Adapter Afaik all WCH chips to ~2020 were 8051 cores. They started experimenting with ARM and RISC-V two years ago https://special.wch.cn/en/mcu/ https://special.wch.cn/en/mcu/
Edit: btw the company might even started as a bootlegger doing counterfeit FTDI serial converters.
- hakfoo 4y agoI wonder if that concept gives them more supply-chain flexibility. If they just have a bunch of 8051 devices sitting around, they can program them to taste at the last minute. I've done some work on a CH375/6 based project, and it's sort of limited-- the fact you can only burst 64 bytes at a time is likely a factor of it being based on such a small MCU, but OTOH, you can always get them at pretty modest prices, while plenty of other parts seem to have gone up or outright unavailable. When I went to get some USB-serialish adaptors, I went specifically for CH340 ones because I know they're explictly NOT a FTDI clone, so there's no risk of malicious drivers bricking them.