2 ms·
You could always go for Xtensa, PIC/AVR, or 68k. Still plenty of those around - although ARM has rapidly been eating their lunch the last few years.
by crote 3y ago
You could always go for Xtensa, PIC/AVR, or 68k. Still plenty of those around - although ARM has rapidly been eating their lunch the last few years.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoPIC and AVR (along with 8051 and 6502 based designs) are still used in current consumer products reusing older designs. Yes, ARM Cortex-M0 can cost the same while offering 2x the processing processing power, but redesigning the PCB and rewriting the entire codebase for a new MCU would offset the processing power gains, which are not needed anyway. Most white-label consumer goods just need to poll some keypad buttons, react to some interrupts, and turn a relay ON/OFF depending on a simple state machine reading an ADC, where an 8-/16-bit PIC/AVR is more than enough. If they have a built-in DSP even better.
- brucehoult 3y agoA 6502 or 8051 can do the job but their prices haven't dropped a lot. You can get a 48 MHz RISC-V from WCH (a big 8051 supplier) or Cortex-M0 from Puya for $0.10 to $0.15 depending on whether it's an 8, 16, or 20 pin package. Both the CH32V003 has 2 KB SRAM and 16 KB flash, and the Puya 3 KB SRAM and 20 KB flash. You get the above prices for the WCH at qty 50 (i.e. $5 - $7) on their Aliexpress store, plus a couple of bucks shipping. Being "too powerful" for the job is irrelevant if it's cheaper anyway. Plus easier to use because both use standard GCC/LLVM, support debugging etc.