I like the RP2040

The same features of pio can be implemented via FPGA, but it's a lot more complicated to do so, and probably you won't find FPGAs as cheap as on the pi

The AEC standards aren't enforced by anything and are mostly just promises that chip manufacturers make (the AEC itself is a private entity). Specifically, that any given chip will still be available in 15 years and that it'll operate fine within certain temperature ranges.

If some part claims to be AEC compliant it's basically just the manufacturer saying so. There's no independent body or even standardized tests to prove a part adheres to any given AEC document. Their own docs state as much:

    AEC Certification
    
    Note that there are no "certifications" for AEC-Q100 qualification and there
    is no certification board run by AEC to qualify parts. Each supplier
    performs their qualification to AEC standards, considers customer
    requirements and submits the data to the user to verify compliance to Q100

In other words, it would be up to any given car manufacturer to verify the claims of any chip vendor using their own testing methods. Since they're going to have to do that anyway, slapping AEC-(whatever) on a product doesn't mean much.

If you test your part in similar conditions and make some availability promises you too can slap an AEC-Q100 label on to your chip!

>Not only does a module reduce implementation complexity dramatically, standardization skips every engineer potentially making their own dumb component placement mistakes.

And we've never found a way around that for the decades we've been putting Atmel, STM, TI, Ambiq, Nordic, etc chips in our designs... There's an intern 2 yards away from me who will be wrestling with getting the right components in place around an STM, for his very first pcb design. This is not a hard problem for anyone who has been doing this for any period of time.

And anyway, those dozen or so components are the oscillator/crystal circuit, the reset holdup, and the 3.3v supply. And then like a bazillion decoupling caps. Certainly, antenna tuning can be hard, but if you can use chip antennas, its not that hard.

All of those are so bog standard that when I looked at e.g. the adafruit RP2040 Feather's schematic, I was sort of surprised at how much is just lifted wholesale from all of their other feathers. Like, the only difference between the RP2040 feather and the nRF52840 feather is the micro itself, the timing circuit (all 5 components of it for the RP2040), and the antenna circuit for the Nordic board.

As to the convenience of modules, I submit that they are very handy for sale to the hobbyist market, but if you want to actually sell your products, you still have to go through the process of RF certification (although at a lower cost. Only you can decide if the higher upfront cost of using a module vs. spinning your own is offset by the lower certification cost), so the benefit is a lot more mixed. Even so, you're only saving the antenna tuning step, which is usually done as a BOM variation, not a major trace adjustment.

As to the dozens of STM and PIC chips, TI has the same situation. Customers want to pay for only what they need and those manufacturers have the manufacturing capacity to support that desire. Its not daunting if the difference matters. This is very much akin to complaining that Home Depot sells too many different kinds of lumber.

As for capacitive touch ICs, sure Adafruit only carries one. But mouser carries 199 that are not end of life. To keep that functionality going, adafruit need only pick up one of them. The cheapest one is even in a TSOT package, so the DFM will be pretty easy. Hell, if I'm not too tired from my job designing and programming these things, I might go home and spin one up tonight. Ought to only take me an hour or so. And the I2C driver another couple hours.

TI's MSPM0G350x (also a low-cost Cortex-M0+ design) runs full-tilt at 8mA, STOP-sleeps at 400uA, STANDBY-sleeps at 5uA, and SHUTDOWN-sleeps at 80nA.

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/mspm0g3507-q1.pdf

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RP2040's full-speed is okay. 20+mA is a lot but it is easily explained by the absurdly huge SRAM banks it has.

But RP2040's sleep states are absolutely AWFUL. The Cortex-M0+ chips are all extremely power-competitive vs each other, because Cortex-M0+ is extremely low-end with regards to core-design.

You're pretty much only getting a Cortex-M0+ because its the absolute minimum 32-bit processor on the market. (8-bitters and 4-bitters exist if you're willing to go even lower-end, but Cortex-M0+ is the bottom of ARM's offerings). So low-power seems to be a must in this market, IMO anyway.

If you're willing to use higher amounts of power, you really should get a few more features, like an FPU on the Cortex-M4.

Interesting, I've got the exact opposite experience.

Small to medium production runs are always a bit of a pain, because you have to do a lot of coordination with the factory when it comes to tooling. You have to ship a custom programmer, get them to install the drivers on whatever OS they are using, and then find a way to write custom code to interact with the programmer and deal with all the possible error conditions.

The RP2040? A simple script which detects the presence of a RPI-labelled flash drive, copies a file, and repeats. Written in half an hour. Drivers? Not an issue. Hardware? Everyone has a USB cable lying around already. Error conditions? It either succeeds, or it doesn't - the OS handles the rest.