Author Topic: 3 cent MCU  (Read 34190 times)

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Offline mikeselectricstuffTopic starter

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3 cent MCU
« on: October 09, 2018, 11:57:22 pm »
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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2018, 12:14:41 am »
Incredible! Basically the cost of a resistor!
 

Offline coppice

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2018, 12:20:22 am »
Interesting device, Its built in a 180nm process, so the core is running way below the 5.5V maximum specified Vcc. That means it must have an internal regulator (which is a die hog), and its managing to operate that with no external pin for a cap.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 12:25:08 am by coppice »
 

Offline coppice

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2018, 12:21:24 am »
Incredible! Basically the cost of a resistor!
Gee, your resistors are expensive. :)
 
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Offline tsman

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2018, 12:24:40 am »
From the PMS150C-U06 thread, soFPG ordered the PADAUK ICE for these chips back in April. I wonder if they ever did anything with it.
 

Online SiliconWizard

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #5 on: October 10, 2018, 01:17:34 am »
Incredible! Basically the cost of a resistor!
Gee, your resistors are expensive. :)

Well that's the average cost I get from most distributors for decent quality resistors unless I order in quantities above 1000 or so!
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #6 on: October 10, 2018, 01:51:08 am »
That is crazy cheap!  -  for the price of one high end Xeon, you can buy a number approaching a hundred thousand of these...   just LOL...


 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #7 on: October 10, 2018, 05:15:43 am »
Program Memory Size... 1KW... right.
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline ali_asadzadeh

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #8 on: October 10, 2018, 05:58:10 am »
Sadly It's OTP |O
ASiDesigner, Stands for Application specific intelligent devices
I'm a Digital Expert from 8-bits to 64-bits
 

Online brucehoult

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #9 on: October 10, 2018, 06:52:07 am »
Sadly It's OTP |O

It's dead cheap. You can afford to waste a few.

I'd definitely want to test things in an emulator before I burned them though! Either on a desktop PC, or else on another microcontroller. The thing is only 16 MHz and six or eight pins, so it should be easy to emulate it (including timing) on a faster CPU. I'd convert its machine code to C and compile that to ARM/MIPS/RISC-V/xtensa native, with a busy-wait for the right clock cycle after each instruction. A 64 or 80 MHz CPU might just about be workable with a lot of care. A 256 or 320 MHz one would be cake.
 

Offline tszaboo

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #10 on: October 10, 2018, 07:30:52 am »
Program Memory Size... 1KW... right.
1 kilo words memory... That is plenty. The famous PIC16F84 had the same. It is overkill for a lot of applications, think of blinken litzen or child games.
I got a similar quote for a reel of 34063 chips (4.1 cent), I think we are reaching the price of package here.
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #11 on: October 10, 2018, 07:36:55 am »
i mean i thought 1 Kilo Watt, cant they find another shortcut for Word? for eg 1KWd?
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline mikeselectricstuffTopic starter

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #12 on: October 10, 2018, 07:41:15 am »
You can go to the moon on 1K....
I regularly use the PIC10F, with 512 words, and there's room for my code to do, for example, bit-bashed serial receive at 250kbaud, gamma  correction and PWM for 4 LEDs,and a bootloader, written mostly in C
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Offline mikeselectricstuffTopic starter

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #13 on: October 10, 2018, 08:04:56 am »
Interesting device, Its built in a 180nm process, so the core is running way below the 5.5V maximum specified Vcc. That means it must have an internal regulator (which is a die hog), and its managing to operate that with no external pin for a cap.
That may be connected with the big warnings about PSU sensitivity on the datasheets
Youtube channel:Taking wierd stuff apart. Very apart.
Mike's Electric Stuff: High voltage, vintage electronics etc.
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Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #14 on: October 10, 2018, 08:36:25 am »
You can go to the moon on 1K....
that is just a part from the story ::)
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline Red Squirrel

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #15 on: October 10, 2018, 08:41:14 am »
I kind of want to see somebody build a large board that is just a matrix of these to do a complex task. Maybe bitcoin mining.  :-DD

It's crazy that they can make something that cheap though.  Like just the materials alone let alone the actual process to make it do something.
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #16 on: October 10, 2018, 10:05:18 am »
i mean i thought 1 Kilo Watt, cant they find another shortcut for Word? for eg 1KWd?

Expecting SI units, it would have been a Kelvin * Watt.

W is fairly common for "word" and given the context, there is little chance for misunderstanding - unless, of course, the reader doesn't know what a "word" is when talking about memory. And if you don't know that, adding another d wouldn't probably help too much.
 

Offline PointyOintment

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #17 on: October 10, 2018, 10:31:49 am »
The main limitations that jumped out for me are that its max speed is 62 kHz (not MHz) and that it has only 64 bytes of ram! (And the B version, oddly, has 60. Anybody know what it uses the other four for, especially because it lacks a timer?)

Sadly It's OTP |O
The English datasheet, in §1.2, says:
Quote
IO space and memory space are independent
but the Chinese datasheet, as translated by Google Translate*, has the wording:
Quote
Independent IO address and storage address for program development
which, to me, on first reading, suggested that it could use an external (rewritable) program memory. However, after having read the English version, I can read the Chinese wording to mean the same thing, so I'm guessing it doesn't actually support external program memory. :(

*Just paste the PDF's URL into the Google Translate field and click Translate.

i mean i thought 1 Kilo Watt, cant they find another shortcut for Word? for eg 1KWd?
Expecting SI units, it would have been a Kelvin * Watt.

W is fairly common for "word" and given the context, there is little chance for misunderstanding - unless, of course, the reader doesn't know what a "word" is when talking about memory. And if you don't know that, adding another d wouldn't probably help too much.
If I wasn't expecting a quantity of "words", I'd read KWd as kelvin-watt-day, which Wolfram|Alpha tells me is equivalent to 86.4 kilojoule-kelvins. (It also claims this to be a measurement of something it calls "entransy", though neither Wikipedia nor Wiktionary knows what that means.)
I refuse to use AD's LTspice or any other "free" software whose license agreement prohibits benchmarking it (which implies it's really bad) or publicly disclosing the existence of the agreement. Fortunately, I haven't agreed to that one, and those terms are public already.
 

Online Monkeh

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #18 on: October 10, 2018, 11:03:35 am »
The main limitations that jumped out for me are that its max speed is 62 kHz (not MHz)

Err, no, that's the frequency of the low power oscillator. The CPU can be clocked from the high power oscillator up to 8MHz.
 
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Offline wraper

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #19 on: October 10, 2018, 11:14:11 am »
and that it has only 64 bytes of ram! (And the B version, oddly, has 60.
How about this? https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/PIC10F200 And it's way more expensive.
Quote
SRAM Bytes 16
Program Memory Size (KB) 0.375
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #20 on: October 10, 2018, 11:17:09 am »
Not released yet:
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #21 on: October 10, 2018, 11:18:45 am »
The main limitations that jumped out for me are that its max speed is 62 kHz (not MHz) a

No, it has a 16MHz internal oscillator with 8MHz and various other divisions available as the processor clock.
The 62KHz is LP mode.
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #22 on: October 10, 2018, 11:23:10 am »
Interesting device, Its built in a 180nm process, so the core is running way below the 5.5V maximum specified Vcc. That means it must have an internal regulator (which is a die hog), and its managing to operate that with no external pin for a cap.
That may be connected with the big warnings about PSU sensitivity on the datasheets

They have an app note on that which I show in my video.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #23 on: October 10, 2018, 11:29:11 am »
Program Memory Size... 1KW... right.

I did this project in under 1K

 

Offline Howardlong

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Re: 3 cent MCU
« Reply #24 on: October 10, 2018, 12:26:47 pm »
You can go to the moon on 1K....
I regularly use the PIC10F, with 512 words, and there's room for my code to do, for example, bit-bashed serial receive at 250kbaud, gamma  correction and PWM for 4 LEDs,and a bootloader, written mostly in C

Totally agree, I've used (and still use) the PIC10F family for many applications. My most recent project used it for an RF powered single chip intelligent RFID tag, with just three external components (decoupling cap, coil and fixed tuning cap).

You use the most appropriate part for the job at hand, taking into account the technical aspects as well as the knowledge and tools that you already have.

Can it be any coincidence the pinout for the SOT23 bears resemblance to the PIC10F family, and similarly the pinout for the SOIC8 resembles that of the PIC12F and 8 pin PIC16F?




 


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