STMicroelectronics Shortage

[hans]

AMD vs. Intel is a great analogy, really (there was Cyrix and others, as well). Try to understand it. And in the end, both have benefited from it; AMD has reproduced the Intel's interface, and later, Intel has reproduced the AMD's interface (AMD64) when it worked out better.

Not at all in comparison with GD32. AMD licenses out AMD64 extensions to Intel, likewise Intel licenses out x86 to AMD and others.

Wikipedia x86, x86-64:

Nevertheless, of those, only Intel, AMD, VIA Technologies and DM&P Electronics hold x86 architectural licenses, and from these, only the first two are actively producing modern 64-bit designs.

x86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD. AMD holds patents on techniques used in AMD64;[90][91][92] those patents must be licensed from AMD in order to implement AMD64.

This is why private processor extensions can be such a crud to deal with.. Software compatibility was usually best on Intel because they had the fastest cores for a long time with the most extensions. The only thing AMD could do is to get a hold of, and implement the same instruction sets:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-new-293-million-joint-venture-to-build-servers-for-the-chinese-market

Lisa Su also noted that the new joint venture would rely solely on AMD’s own intellectual property. This raises some significant questions about what, exactly, AMD can license. One of the problems with trying to talk about the x86 patent agreements between Intel and AMD is that what we refer to as “x86” is a collection of dozens of patents filed over decades by both companies. Intel still holds patents on major features like SSE4.x, AVX, and AVX2, while AMD has patents for AMD64.

So unless Gigadevice has paid STMicroelectronics a bag of money to use their patents, they might be infringing them.

On the other hand, how much is there to patent about the RTL of a part? And then I mean the programmer facing part; the bits that are in the registers... is that copyrighted? Patented? Do you claim binary or source code compatible? I think that is very debatable as it's mostly 'software'. A bunch of structs and memory address. How much is there infringing about it?

The actual HDL source code is covered by copyright. If Gigadevice would be forced in court to show sources and IF they would show 'stolen' or 'leaked' code from ST, I'm sure they will be in big trouble. But I think that it's far more likely that they have cloned the same functionality in their spare time. If you look closely at many "clone" devices you often see that high design effort features like power saving or mixed-signal (ADC, DAC) are terrible. It is often relatively simple to get something to work, but to perfect and polish it is 80% of the design effort. Likewise it is relatively simple to get a large databus in an MCU working at several tens of MHz, but if it then also must be power efficient such that you can compete on uA/MHz or <1 uA sleep mode, not so much. *This* could be a major part where vendors like ST, Atmel, Microchip, NXP, Silabs, Nordic, etc all have their own special sauce and patents in. And this is also exactly the reason why I'm sincerely looking forward for RISC-V devices specifically from those vendors, because the actual CPU core used can be an ill predictor for actual power efficiency (e.g. look at how much more efficient STM32L4 devices can be compared to STM32L1 or STM32L0), and a little while ago I checked out a RISC-V CPU that looked great.. except it still ran at 1mA/MHz or something. 

[S. Petrukhin]

I think it is very important for Chinese guys to enter foreign markets and they try to comply with the rules of foreign markets in every possible way. This may be difficult to understand for those, who make rules and are used to dictating them to others, but in the East it is customary to respect the rules when coming to visit. It's just a tradition.

I have no proof, but I believe that they didn't steal the crystal's photomasks, but created their own STM-compatible processor. This is supported by a 1/3 higher clock frequency, for example, this is no copy. And GigaDevice's dataset is much cleaner and more convenient.

European guys need to think, they are doing a good job, they are doing well, but they are a little fat and clumsy. Very well-fed life in Europe with inflated prices, and in America too, separation from the other World. This gap is not always fair and the swing always swings in both directions.

[Kjelt]

European guys need to think, they are doing a good job, they are doing well, but they are a little fat and clumsy. Very well-fed life in Europe with inflated prices, and in America too, separation from the other World. This gap is not always fair and the swing always swings in both directions.

Is that why chinese copy the products we invent 
If you can talk to our government to reduce the cost of living to the cost in China and decrease our average house prices from €300000 to €100000 with return of the previous investment I have no problem with a 50% wage cut.
But actually seeing the prices of STM microcontrollers , the entire st.com infrastructure with free good quality compiler and very cheap almost no profit Nucleo boards and st link programmers etc. Etc. so I don't have a clue wtf you're argument is about.

Can you show me the great GD free compiler, ide, experimenting boards, programmers , oh wait no you can't.

[S. Petrukhin]

European guys need to think, they are doing a good job, they are doing well, but they are a little fat and clumsy. Very well-fed life in Europe with inflated prices, and in America too, separation from the other World. This gap is not always fair and the swing always swings in both directions.

Is that why chinese copy the products we invent 
If you can talk to our government to reduce the cost of living to the cost in China and decrease our average house prices from €300000 to €100000 with return of the previous investment I have no problem with a 50% wage cut.
But actually seeing the prices of STM microcontrollers , the entire st.com infrastructure with free good quality compiler and very cheap almost no profit Nucleo boards and st link programmers etc. Etc. so I don't have a clue wtf you're argument is about.

Can you show me the great GD free compiler, ide, experimenting boards, programmers , oh wait no you can't.

I don't blame you or justify stealing. It would be better not to lower your standard of living, but to improve it for everyone.

But I am telling you about the danger that is before you (and me to). You become very far from competition - this is the reality.

China is developing very intensively, they will reach European quality after a while, but they will not have a lazy manager who is not very useful, but they pay a lot of money for being able to inflate their cheeks and say the right words. You can just sit there and wait for the Chinese to push you out from everywhere. Don't expect the Chinese to always make low quality, they will learn very quickly.

STM is a good processor, really like it and use it. Yes, it's really not expensive, but remember when there were at least some development tools for STM. And remember Atmel-Studio when it appeared with a great knowledge base and examples. Moreover, very high-quality examples that you could trust and not expect surprises. There is no such reliability in the garbage generated by CubeMX, many programmers do not even understand what is happening there.

You taught the сommunists the market economy. Your western business went East for cheap labor. No one forced you to shoot yourself in the foot. 

[Kjelt]

Oh yes China will definitely dominate globally in a few decades, it is happening already for years and not even with competing, they just buy companies, harbors, communities and electrical and waterworks.
So no surprise there, if you look at the history of the world this is happening since humans started walking on two feet. The artificial countermeasures for instance the us takes to cut off china from the latest chip manufacturing fabs is just a temporary setback. They now have to proof if they also can do this themselves, we have to wait and see. But wealth in the world is not unlimited, if the west goes poorer so will china have  less export and so on, so it is mutually beneficial to keep relations and wealth in balance.

[S. Petrukhin]

Oh yes China will definitely dominate globally in a few decades, it is happening already for years and not even with competing, they just buy companies, harbors, communities and electrical and waterworks.
So no surprise there, if you look at the history of the world this is happening since humans started walking on two feet. The artificial countermeasures for instance the us takes to cut off china from the latest chip manufacturing fabs is just a temporary setback. They now have to proof if they also can do this themselves, we have to wait and see. But wealth in the world is not unlimited, if the west goes poorer so will china have  less export and so on, so it is mutually beneficial to keep relations and wealth in balance.

Who is stopping the Dutch from buying up companies, harbors, communities, electrical and hydraulic structures? 
Who forces them to sell? 

[Kjelt]

Oh yes China will definitely dominate globally in a few decades, it is happening already for years and not even with competing, they just buy companies, harbors, communities and electrical and waterworks.
So no surprise there, if you look at the history of the world this is happening since humans started walking on two feet. The artificial countermeasures for instance the us takes to cut off china from the latest chip manufacturing fabs is just a temporary setback. They now have to proof if they also can do this themselves, we have to wait and see. But wealth in the world is not unlimited, if the west goes poorer so will china have  less export and so on, so it is mutually beneficial to keep relations and wealth in balance.

Who is stopping the Dutch from buying up companies, harbors, communities, electrical and hydraulic structures? 
Who forces them to sell? 

That my friend is the hell of neoliberalist capitalism at its worst, short time vision, short time infividual greed and cashing. The good companies are the family owned medium companies that already exists for tens of years. They save in good times, use it in bad times and have a longer term strategy. But the so called moneymaking hedgefunds they are just in it for the short term, buy a company rip it apart and sell the good bits toss the rest. The vultures of our society.
And the workers sho all build it are left behind unemployed.

[tom66]

Has anyone tried EFM32? https://www.silabs.com/mcu/32-bit . I set on stm32 because I'm familiar with ChibiOS, but may be it's time to move on or try something new.

I have used EZR32, which is the radio-integrated version of EFM32.

Bloody awful processor with plenty of poorly documented 'features'.     Only 4 timers on the EFM32WG series which was (at the time) their mainstream CPU.  We thought we could get away with it initially but ran out eventually.     The radio is a separate die,  that's fine,  but it interfaces over a buggy SPI interface and frequently locks up with no way to recover without a complete hard reset of the radio core (takes 50ms.)  That's not fine.   

Then there's interesting bugs with the SDK and IDE provided, not uncommon perhaps but in some cases we've taken over a day to figure out what random configuration changed and broke things.

Silabs support is next to useless if you're small fry, they don't care, good luck getting any response back from a certain FAE.

[S. Petrukhin]

Oh yes China will definitely dominate globally in a few decades, it is happening already for years and not even with competing, they just buy companies, harbors, communities and electrical and waterworks.
So no surprise there, if you look at the history of the world this is happening since humans started walking on two feet. The artificial countermeasures for instance the us takes to cut off china from the latest chip manufacturing fabs is just a temporary setback. They now have to proof if they also can do this themselves, we have to wait and see. But wealth in the world is not unlimited, if the west goes poorer so will china have  less export and so on, so it is mutually beneficial to keep relations and wealth in balance.

Who is stopping the Dutch from buying up companies, harbors, communities, electrical and hydraulic structures? 
Who forces them to sell? 

That my friend is the hell of neoliberalist capitalism at its worst, short time vision, short time infividual greed and cashing. The good companies are the family owned medium companies that already exists for tens of years. They save in good times, use it in bad times and have a longer term strategy. But the so called moneymaking hedgefunds they are just in it for the short term, buy a company rip it apart and sell the good bits toss the rest. The vultures of our society.
And the workers sho all build it are left behind unemployed.

It's amazing to me. I understand the European bureaucracy, but I have always thought about the strong dependence of power in Europe on the desires of people.

[S. Petrukhin]

By the way, ESP, as far as I understand, is a completely Chinese project... What do you say? What other processors have similar functionality? Only recently has ST released a processor of this type.

[S. Petrukhin]

By the way, ESP, as far as I understand, is a completely Chinese project... What do you say? What other processors have similar functionality? Only recently has ST released a processor of this type.

With quite some help from our international friends.

I believe while the hardware is Chinese with a bunch of Western IPs (mostly, the CPU and IF ADC/DAC), a substantial portion of its BSP and toolchain are written by ESP's employees from former-USSR countries and India, and a few from Australia, USA and more.

I believe some of their top developers are from Russia (igrr, the boss of their software team), Bulgaria and Slovakia.

But these guys work in China, right? In America, you know, there is also a good international of developers and programmers.
And I worked briefly as a programmer in the US. 
I am saying that ESP was definitely not stolen from anyone, it is a unique proprietary product.

[dietert1]

I am wondering whose business contributors promote, who put everything in terms of nationality. I think STM is a multinational, like most of the others. That Chinese are emphasizing their national efforts means they are a little backward, similar to the electors of Trump. I can't believe people in China are more intelligent or better educated than elsewhere. The communities of the 21st century are global.

Regards, Dieter

[Kjelt]

I just did.

No you did not, you pointed to western made compilers , infrastructure and all cloned and copied stuff from western manufacturers.
If the chinese are so terrific and great it is about time they invent and improve their own things instead of copying existing stuff, the world is waiting, and still disappointed.

[Kjelt]

It's amazing to me. I understand the European bureaucracy, but I have always thought about the strong dependence of power in Europe on the desires of people.

We are still not one in Europe and the EU government is divided by national interests that conflict.
Most people I talked with have lost their faith in the EU and their old fashioned investment plans. Instead of making huge efforts to boost technological development most money goes to farmers and last century technology. And the potatoeheads sitting in the parliament all are products of alfa and gamma party time studies. Oh well at least it is peace, for now.

[Siwastaja]

Can you show me the great GD free compiler, ide, experimenting boards, programmers , oh wait no you can't.

The actual software workflow for STM32 is usually completely based on free, open source GNU tools, specifically and most significantly, gcc, but also binutils, gdb, newlib, etc. ST has basically zero contribution to any of this. ARM as a company has likely significantly contributed to gcc-arm, but again GigaDevices are licensing ARM cores properly (they likely get a good deal from ARM; it's way easier to just buy the licences than to try to recreate binary-compatible core like Cyrix was of Pentium).

The utter pile of software shit produced by ST to run on the top of the actual backend is of near-zero value. The fact people use these tools does not mean they are really useful, or needed; they just exist, are easy to download and run on Windows, hence used.

Your lack of understanding and replacing it with ideological mental dishonesty is showing, and ugly.

[Kjelt]

That is true if they have a legitimate arm license than they can join the arm infrastructure out there but why 1:1 immitate an st processor peripheral and pinout. Make your own better peripherals and own pinout, it is just too easy and I am also very annoyed by the hacking and espionage from China and other countries to steal IP from western tech companies which again was proven last week in our country.
China has the money, china has the brains and knowledge, go start leading and create instead of dteal and copy, that is the message. Ugly or not, just the truth.

[tom66]

Emulating STM gives competition for ST, and a second source if things go wrong. As engineers, we should applaud competition.  The GD processors aren't reverse engineered copies, they are ground-up reimplementations of STM32 architectures, some with better performance than others... it is just like Wine compatibility layer for Windows,  or Dalvik/ART on Android for Java.

The Supreme Court will debate whether the Java API is patentable/copyrightable. I hope that Oracle fail in their lawsuit. It would be a dangerous precedent to set. APIs should not be copyrightable in and of themselves.

[BravoV]

That is true if they have a legitimate arm license than they can join the arm infrastructure out there but why 1:1 immitate an st processor peripheral and pinout. Make your own better peripherals and own pinout, it is just too easy and I am also very annoyed by the hacking and espionage from China and other countries to steal IP from western tech companies which again was proven last week in our country.
China has the money, china has the brains and knowledge, go start leading and create instead of dteal and copy, that is the message. Ugly or not, just the truth.

Hmm .. such an englightment, doing something in return for you, 3 words ... "Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie" . 

[Siwastaja]

That is true if they have a legitimate arm license than they can join the arm infrastructure out there but why 1:1 immitate an st processor peripheral and pinout. Make your own better peripherals and own pinout, it is just too easy and I am also very annoyed by the hacking and espionage from China and other countries to steal IP from western tech companies which again was proven last week in our country.
China has the money, china has the brains and knowledge, go start leading and create instead of dteal and copy, that is the message. Ugly or not, just the truth.

Why would different manufacturers do 78xx regulators with the same pinout when they could invent their own pinouts, I wonder??

[Kjelt]

GD started from making STM32 compatible chips. Now their latest products are diverging from STM32 by quite a margin.

Good to hear, looking forward to fresh products.

[S. Petrukhin]

You know, as a consumer, I like having full compatibility. If ST or someone else doesn't like it, convince the court. Personally I haven't seen any complaints about GD. Europe is now very unreliable, some cataclysms or just crazy politicians can make STM32 inaccessible to me. This is probably already happening. I'll just buy a GD32 from the Chinese guys and solder it in place of the STM32. And most likely I will specify GD32 in the next purchase. There is also an analog of STM32 in Russia, but it has significant differences, is very expensive and difficult to access - it is produced for military purposes.

[S. Petrukhin]

I am wondering whose business contributors promote, who put everything in terms of nationality. I think STM is a multinational, like most of the others. That Chinese are emphasizing their national efforts means they are a little backward, similar to the electors of Trump. I can't believe people in China are more intelligent or better educated than elsewhere. The communities of the 21st century are global.

Regards, Dieter

Guys in China are more hardworking, more efficient, and less whimsical - I think so. 
I can say this with confidence about Russian people.

[GK2]

Good to hear, looking forward to fresh products.

Well, so long as they do better than Tsinghua Unigroup; one of China's largest technology conglomerates which just a little while ago was tendering multi billion dollar acquisitions and was being spruiked as one of, if not the key player in China's pending conquering of Western dominance in semiconductor technology. This State Owned Enterprise that reportedly gets 30% of its funding from the state is now just one of the latest casualties in China's record yuan tally of bond defaulters for 2020 and is sending out warnings that it possibly faces bankruptcy. 

This is the "efficiency" of China's debt-driven growth model finally beginning to pay dividends I guess, but that won't deter the sycophants with their blinders on.
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/tsinghua-unigroup-s-debt-risk-widens-with-dollar-bond-defaults
https://www.ft.com/content/ee38e7b8-989b-4130-bf76-707805104d06

[uski]

Having worked in high volume manufacturing, I know how bad it can be to deal with a shortage

And I can saw that ST is shooting themselves in the foot if they are making their customers suffer from a shortage, because customers will switch if it gets bad enough. And once a customer switch, it is hard to get them back.
It is difficult to switch from a microcontroller since a lot of code has to be ported, but this is also why it is even harder to regain a customer once the have switched.

In a previous company I worked in, I remember blacklisting both Atmel and Winbond because they f***** up. For years they tried to come back, but we wanted to do nothing with them.
Atmel de-committed from a delivery because they got a big order from a bigger customer and wanted to serve them instead, putting us in a very dire situation. Next design was without any Atmel part and we made sure we had no Atmel part anywhere. This was 8+ years ago and to this day they are still blacklisted in the company.

And Winbond promised a super price to win the design, and increased significantly the pricing as we were close to production to corner us. I never removed a flash chip from my design so quick. W*nkers !

I work in another company now but I will think twice if I ever have to design a Winbond or Atmel part in a design. So this blacklist somewhat survives between companies in the perception that designers have of the brands.

So there is a big reputation hit when a supplier misbehaves like this. Shortages, supply chain issues, have a big impact on their customers, and the customers will strike back one way or another. Big customers might use lawyers or penalties in supply chain agreements, and smaller customers will switch and blacklist.

[Klemken]

We use STM32F031F6P6 for one of our main projects and its out of stock on farnell, arrow, mouser,.. everywhere and according to support, it wont be restocked for months.
Luckly STM32L031F6P6 is in stock everywhere, compatible and only requires a small amount of modification to software to work for us. But still, its annoying.