3 ms·

I'm already seeing lots of take-up of RISC-V in the embedded controller space, mostly from Chinese firms. MCU's that only cost a dime or less with the power of

• janoc 4y ago
  As long as you can get documentation and development tooling. An MCU costing a dime is useless if all the documentation is only in Mandarin and it requires proprietary tooling including porgramming/debugging dongles that work only for one specific PC configuration. And that you need to buy/download from some obscure vendor website in China. That's very much why you don't see Chinese parts in Western designs much. Cost per part is not that relevant if the component is impossible to do R&D with and/or support it long term. Microchip still sells even chips like 16C54 - 25 year old designs. Is the Chinese vendor going to be here in two years? And for how long are they committing to supply their parts? E.g. the first SiFive RISC-V micros are obsolete and EOL already ... Also, the Qualcomm/ARM dust-up is not about microcontrollers (Cortex-M) but the higher performance cores. Those are licensed differently. So even if the Qualcomm claims were true (a big if!), they likely still wouldn't apply to micros.
  • UltraViolence 4y ago
    Most of these Chinese MCU's are probably targeted at Chinese OEM's and not the Western hobbyist / tinkerer markets. But after a while they'll want to expand their market share and gear them towards hobbyists. With decent documentation and GCC support (hopefully).