When getting into a project, I usually work with someone in the hardware design space (I can do larger electronics myself and thus prototypes, but I'm hired for very small circuit projects) and after creating a prototype, we usually start searching for the the cheapest MCU (and other components) that fit the project. Spending a lot of time doing assembly and making it fit the constrained memory will pay off when doing million factory runs. A lot of MCU's I work with are faster (or only marginally slower) than my beloved Z80 I grew up with an programmed many years, but usually have less (sometimes far less) memory. I have not worked with kilohertz since the early 80s but he, if it fits (it almost never does) I am all for the lowest priced and power friendly MCUs I can find.
The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
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Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#12It is interesting that its possible to produce chips at this price for more than a short time period. Also that they are all basically PIC clones or variants speaks to the core competency of these companies is manufacturing and operational efficiency, not MCU design. I think a fascinating experiment here would be to invest some time in an unencumbered scalable design that could be implemented very inexpensively (say…
Chips inspired by Chuck Moore's designs would fit this niche.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#13Some Philips sonicare toothbrushes use(d) a 4-bit microcontroller from an obscure Swiss company. (From memory, since I can't find the EEVBlog video teardown) 52 bytes of RAM, custom size mask ROM, ? Kilohertz clock speed. It makes sense, they just needed a timer for the "2 minutes of brushing is up" feature, and maybe some battery management. It still surprised me that it was worth the hassle to save a few cents, eve…
It's pretty easy to make the hassle worthwhile, if you are selling (particularly many) millions of things. Even saving a dime on BOM for a million units shipped will pay an engineer year, roughly.
I still remember a friend relating with a mixture of horror and fondness that in 15 years probably the biggest impact he ever had to the bottom line of [big computer manufacturer no longer in existence] was re-routing a PCB in a way that let them make it smaller with no functional change. The materials cost savings over product lifetime was in the 7-8 figures range, he claimed.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#14These have their uses. A friend who frequently does contract development in the toy space has (or at least used to have) a favorite go-to MCU that costs under $0.06 in bare die. It is essentially a 6502 with 100 bytes of RAM and a metric butt-load of mask-programmable ROM. It was originally designed for greeting cards. He has designed it into toys. It is hard to use, you need a dev kit and a good relationship with th…
Great story, thanks for sharing. I for one pretty much constantly live the life he alludes to at my company bomquote.com. In China, we actually negotiate in increments of ~1/6th of a penny.
Why not a tenth?
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#15Some Philips sonicare toothbrushes use(d) a 4-bit microcontroller from an obscure Swiss company. (From memory, since I can't find the EEVBlog video teardown) 52 bytes of RAM, custom size mask ROM, ? Kilohertz clock speed. It makes sense, they just needed a timer for the "2 minutes of brushing is up" feature, and maybe some battery management. It still surprised me that it was worth the hassle to save a few cents, eve…
I don’t know how, or why, but I’ve bought the same Phillips toothbrush for $20 from AliExpress when my original broke.
And I buy the heads from Asia too for a fraction of the store price.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#16When getting into a project, I usually work with someone in the hardware design space (I can do larger electronics myself and thus prototypes, but I'm hired for very small circuit projects) and after creating a prototype, we usually start searching for the the cheapest MCU (and other components) that fit the project. Spending a lot of time doing assembly and making it fit the constrained memory will pay off when doin…
It's funny but I've been driving a Z80 with an arduino-mega recently, and I actually timed it for the first time a couple of days ago. I'm getting 6000 clock-cycles a second. 6Khz, rather than that 6Mhz it would be cable of running standalone.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great story, thanks for sharing. I for one pretty much constantly live the life he alludes to at my company bomquote.com. In China, we actually negotiate in increments of ~1/6th of a penny.
Why not a tenth?
I guess the 1/6 comes from a currency conversion
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#18The top end padauk ("PFS173") actually seems pretty reasonable chip, comparable to bottom end attinys with only quarter of the price.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great story, thanks for sharing. I for one pretty much constantly live the life he alludes to at my company bomquote.com. In China, we actually negotiate in increments of ~1/6th of a penny.
Why not a tenth?
The yuan-usd exchange rate has floated around 6:1 until recently, with yuan denominated down to 0.01.
So possibly that.
Re: The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
#20These have their uses. A friend who frequently does contract development in the toy space has (or at least used to have) a favorite go-to MCU that costs under $0.06 in bare die. It is essentially a 6502 with 100 bytes of RAM and a metric butt-load of mask-programmable ROM. It was originally designed for greeting cards. He has designed it into toys. It is hard to use, you need a dev kit and a good relationship with th…
"metric butt-load of mask-programmable ROM"
What would that be in this context? I'm guessing we're talking KB rather than TB?