Tag: MCU

Decapsulating the CH32V203 Reveals a Separate Flash Die

The CH32V203 is a 32bit RISC-V microcontroller. In the produt portfolio of WCH it is the next step up from the CH32V003, sporting a much higher clock rate of 144 MHz and a more powerful RISC-V core with RV32IMAC instruction set architecture. The CH32V203 is also extremely affordable, starting at around 0.40 USD (>100 bracket), depending on configuration.

An interesting remark on twitter piqued my interest: Supposedly the listed flash memory size only refers to a fraction that can be accessed with zero waitstate, while the total flash size is even 224kb. The datasheet indeed has a footnote claiming the same. In addition, the RB variant offers the option to reconfigure between RAM and flash, which is rather odd, considering that writing to flash is usually much slower than to RAM.

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The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers.

Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. Digging a bit further, it became apparent that there is an entire market segment of ultra-low-cost microcontrollers. Almost all of them are products of rather unknown companies from China or Taiwan. This write up summarizes my findings in this rather peculiar niche.

We already learned that there is a large variety of very powerful $1.00 microcontrollers, but what about the $0.10 MCU? Are they indeed all “terrible”, as suggested elsewhere?

Continue reading “The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers.”