More Chinese-made MCU.

[technix]

I have ran across some more Chinese one-dollar MCU samples today and bought a few of each: Megawin, SyncMOS and Nouvoton. All of which are 12T/6T 8051 chips.

Is there anything to test for?

[Whales]

Programming methods?  Can you get the software?  Can you get the programmers?

I learned the hard way that you can't just buy stuff and worry about it afterwards.

[technix]

Programming methods?  Can you get the software?  Can you get the programmers?

I learned the hard way that you can't just buy stuff and worry about it afterwards.

If you understand Chinese you can find some documentations on that.

[senso]

Nuvoton is kinda known, its not obscure at all.
https://www.nuvoton.com/hq/?__locale=en

Or is it really Nouvoton?

[westfw]

It's a bit interesting that there seem to be Nuvoton "breakout boards" ("Blue-Pill" competitors?) available on Aliexpress despite relatively low interest from the US.https://www.aliexpress.com/store/213957/search?origin=y&SearchText=nuvoton

[technix]

Nuvoton is kinda known, its not obscure at all.
https://www.nuvoton.com/hq/?__locale=en

Or is it really Nouvoton?

It is Nuvoton. My phone auto-mistook it.

It's a bit interesting that there seem to be Nuvoton "breakout boards" ("Blue-Pill" competitors?) available on Aliexpress despite relatively low interest from the US.https://www.aliexpress.com/store/213957/search?origin=y&SearchText=nuvoton

I have one too, but their built-in programmer and debugger Nu-Link-Me is Keil-only (not just Windows-only.) I wasn't able to find enough resources to create a CMSIS-DAP firmware for that.

[FrankBuss]

The Nuvotron microcontrollers look a bit expensive. This is the cheapest I can find, $26.72 for 100:

https://lcsc.com/product-detail/NUVOTON_N79E8132AS16_C109374.html

I can't read the Chinese datasheet, but looks similar to an ATTiny204, $42.26 for 100:

https://www.digikey.com/short/j0z338

Atmel Studio is free for the ATTiny, and you could even program it with a $2 Arduino Nano. And English documentation, lots of community forums for it etc. The 16 cent price difference would make only sense if you need a lot of it.

[technix]

The Nuvotron microcontrollers look a bit expensive. This is the cheapest I can find, $26.72 for 100:

https://lcsc.com/product-detail/NUVOTON_N79E8132AS16_C109374.html

I can't read the Chinese datasheet, but looks similar to an ATTiny204, $42.26 for 100:

https://www.digikey.com/short/j0z338

Atmel Studio is free for the ATTiny, and you could even program it with a $2 Arduino Nano. And English documentation, lots of community forums for it etc. The 16 cent price difference would make only sense if you need a lot of it.

What I got is this: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/NUVOTON_Nuvoton-Tech-W78E516DDG_C5370.html A closer approximation would be AT89C51RD2.

[legacy]

I wonder why they don't write datasheet in English.
In Europe, it's a common practice to make your products well understood.
China is not part of Europe, but ... a lot of Chinese products are bought by European citizens and companies.

For me, it doesn't make sense 

[senso]

They are for their market, not for European or USA usage.

And europeans might buy the end product, but they are not designing them.

[legacy]

They are for their market, not for European or USA usage.
And europeans might buy the end product, but they are not designing them.

Ok, this makes sense; I have customers in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherland, UK, Norway ... and even for our internal market, we all write documentation in English.

Even our job qualifications are written in English 

[jackcom]

I'm chinese. 看见你们不懂中文，我就放心了。

[sstepane]

Most vaping devices use Nuvoton MCUs. These are quite good ones. Sometimes even a bit more robust than some STM32s (less prone to break on ports). However its USB ports must be well protected, or it will burn out, but, in most cases MCU continues to work.
I've seen M452, Nano126, Nano120 and NUC220 series go with oled and color displays, and measure quite nice sub-ohm resistances, controlling buck/boost drive-mosfet parts, which is, basically is a vaping device.
You can buy some very cheap ones as a demo from Nuvoton itself or look at taobao for good deals.
I believe that their controllers/mcu also go somewhere in notebooks as some local workshops carry it in stock for repair services.

There are SDKs from Nuvoton, original and clone ICE programmers and support in Keil for these MCUs, so I'd say it's quite mature.
And lots of english datasheets/documents.

[NorthGuy]

They are for their market, not for European or USA usage.

I guess Western designers are more demanding in terms of support and documentation. And they don't buy in quantities. Marketing to them may not be worthy for Chinese chip makers.

"Western" chip makers like Chinese markets too. Lots of Microchip's PICs are (were?) sold to China.

[coppice]

They are for their market, not for European or USA usage.
And europeans might buy the end product, but they are not designing them.

Ok, this makes sense; I have customers in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherland, UK, Norway ... and even for our internal market, we all write documentation in English.

Even our job qualifications are written in English 

You live in an area with fragmented langauges, and so people use a common ground. If your mother tongue is English, your incentive to learn another language can be very low.

If you write documents only in Chinese nearly 20% of the human race can read them. The percentage of MCU users who can read them is far higher. A huge percentage of designs using a small MCU are now produced in China, so the need for Chinese documentation actually exceeds the need for English, and western vendors know it. If you looked at the documentation for most western MCUs 20 years ago, there was almost nothing available in Chinese. Then the distributors in China started driving the push to get documentation for some key parts with high potential in China available with Chinese documentation. Local university people wrote books in Chinese on the PIC, AVR, MSP430, and especially the 8051. Distributors started doing translations of data sheets themselves, and gradually this work has been pushed upstream to the silicon vendors. Now most western vendor's sites have a Chinese language button on the front page, even if they offer no other language options.

Nuvoton, under its original guise as Winbond, started at a time when Taiwanese companies were starting to make their mark in the computer business, and made various chips that helped rounded out a PC motherboard. Because their key customers were in Taiwan, they mostly worked in Chinese from day one. The end market for their parts was almost entirely in the west at that time, but Winbond's customer's first language was Chinese, and Chinese documentation was all that really mattered. As things worked out, Winbond/Nuvoton have never really been under much pressure to expand their documentation to English. Their key requirement was to ensure their documentation was available in simplified Chinese as well as the original traditional Chinese, as their market in Mainland China grew.

[schmitt trigger]

At the dawn of the XXI century, many websites would feature Japanese language selector buttons.

Although you can still find them, they have been displaced in large part by Chinese language selectors.

[NorthGuy]

As things worked out, Winbond/Nuvoton have never really been under much pressure to expand their documentation to English.

I remember I used Winbond flash. They had very nice datasheet in English.

[SiliconWizard]

They are for their market, not for European or USA usage.
And europeans might buy the end product, but they are not designing them.

Absolutely. Something we discuss here on a regular basis. Those chips are not designed for other markets than their own, and it usually makes little sense to use them in our designs for a lot of reasons IMO (not adapted to the kind of products we usually design and sell, little tech support or very difficult to get, documentation in chinese only, unknown lifetime, unknown future chinese policies, etc)
It wouldn't be economically viable for those chinese IC companies to make the extra effort to make those ICs more accessible to us, and this is not what they want on a strategic level either IMO. This is not what they are after whatsoever. They don't want us to try and compete with their end products using their own components!

Of course those ICs are still a curiosity for us and we may get interested in fiddling with them, but seeing them as more than a curiosity at this point is often pointless. Just my opinion though.

[coppice]

As things worked out, Winbond/Nuvoton have never really been under much pressure to expand their documentation to English.

I remember I used Winbond flash. They had very nice datasheet in English.

Flash chips are very general purpose. They've always made sure English documentation was available for their general purpose stuff, mostly memory.

[PCB.Wiz]

The Nuvotron microcontrollers look a bit expensive. This is the cheapest I can find, $26.72 for 100:

https://lcsc.com/product-detail/NUVOTON_N79E8132AS16_C109374.html

I can't read the Chinese datasheet, but looks similar to an ATTiny204, $42.26 for 100:

https://www.digikey.com/short/j0z338

Atmel Studio is free for the ATTiny, and you could even program it with a $2 Arduino Nano. And English documentation, lots of community forums for it etc. The 16 cent price difference would make only sense if you need a lot of it.

Guess it depends on your calibration of 'expensive'.  26c for a MCU is very cheap on Digikey, as your own example proves.


of course, many buyers look more at best value, than lowest price, and there the N76E003AT20, with a 1T core, 18KFlash and 1kRAM is rather better value than the 4k ~1c cheaper sibling.

No need to read Chinese either, just pop over to
https://www.nuvoton.com/hq/products/microcontrollers/8bit-8051-mcus/Data-Sheet/?__locale=en&resourcePage=Y
and pick any _EN data sheet.

[FrankBuss]

The Nuvoton website says, the regular price for the N76E003AT20 is $0.75. You get more flash, more RAM, a better core, and a smaller package for less with a SAMD21 at Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/short/j0htm7

[PCB.Wiz]

The Nuvoton website says, the regular price for the N76E003AT20 is $0.75. You get more flash, more RAM, a better core, and a smaller package for less with a SAMD21 at Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/short/j0htm7

Well, I guess if you make your volume buying decisions based on one-off web columns, that does carries a risk.
(typical Nuvoton website price curve looks like this  1-99  0.75  100-499 0.63  500-999 0.48 1000-1999 0.40 2K - 5K 0.26 5K - 10K 0.25 )

I prefer to look at the main stockists, and check the industry prices, in more realistic volumes when I select a part.

Digikey lists N76E003 at 35/38c/3k, and lcsc has stocks and shows 100+ $0.2706 2072+ $0.2532
That SAMD21 ? it's > 73c/3k, on Digikey.

[thm_w]

NOTE: ATSAMD21J16A is not recommended for new designs, please use ATSAMD21J16B.

and the B version is about twice the cost of A, ouch.

https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD21J16

[FrankBuss]

But do you get a free IDE for it? Looks like for some ARM M0 microcontrollers from Nuvoton the Keil IDE is free:

http://www2.keil.com/nuvoton

I guess the Keil IDE for 8051 is not free, and usually it costs like $5000. And the N76E003 is 8051 based, and 0 in stock at Digikey, with a minimum order quantity of 1026 ICs.

The SAMD parts are supported in the Arduino IDE, which is free.

If you want to sell 1000 of it, IDE + parts might costs $5250 for Nuvotron, and $730 for the SAMD.

But the Mini51FDE looks interesting. It is an ARM Cortex-M0, 24 MHz, 4 kB flash, 2 kB RAM, so it is supported by the free version of the Keil IDE, and you can get it for $0.46 for 1000 at direct.nuvoton.com. This would result in a price of $460 for 1000, and the Keil IDE is much better than using any Arduino or Eclipse based IDE. Too bad it doesn't have USB and a bit low on flash memory. But definitely worth to consider for some products, because the processing power would be much higher than e.g. for an ATTiny with an 8 bit core and lower clock rate.

But it all matters only if you sell thousands of it. Otherwise just choose the microcontroller with the best features, or that you already know, because the time you spend to learn the new peripherals, IDE etc., wouldn't make sense (if you need a few days for learning and testing, the salary for it would be higher than what you save on parts cost), unless you do it as a hobby, like I use to do

[technix]

But do you get a free IDE for it? Looks like for some ARM M0 microcontrollers from Nuvoton the Keil IDE is free:

http://www2.keil.com/nuvoton

I guess the Keil IDE for 8051 is not free, and usually it costs like $5000. And the N76E003 is 8051 based, and 0 in stock at Digikey, with a minimum order quantity of 1026 ICs.

The SAMD parts are supported in the Arduino IDE, which is free.

If you want to sell 1000 of it, IDE + parts might costs $5250 for Nuvotron, and $730 for the SAMD.

But the Mini51FDE looks interesting. It is an ARM Cortex-M0, 24 MHz, 4 kB flash, 2 kB RAM, so it is supported by the free version of the Keil IDE, and you can get it for $0.46 for 1000 at direct.nuvoton.com. This would result in a price of $460 for 1000, and the Keil IDE is much better than using any Arduino or Eclipse based IDE. Too bad it doesn't have USB and a bit low on flash memory. But definitely worth to consider for some products, because the processing power would be much higher than e.g. for an ATTiny with an 8 bit core and lower clock rate.

But it all matters only if you sell thousands of it. Otherwise just choose the microcontroller with the best features, or that you already know, because the time you spend to learn the new peripherals, IDE etc., wouldn't make sense (if you need a few days for learning and testing, the salary for it would be higher than what you save on parts cost), unless you do it as a hobby, like I use to do

For me I use SDCC for 8051 and GCC for ARM: the tools are free.

Also that chip is not intended to be used in a product at all, instead it is just some exploratory experiments.