3 cent MCU

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just stumbled on this browsing lcsc ( JLC's component store)
Under 3 cents 100x
https://lcsc.com/product-detail/PADAUK_PADAUK-Tech-PMS150C_C129127.html

English data here :
http://www.padauk.com.tw/upload/doc/PMS150C%20datasheet%20V004_EN_20180124.pdf

[SiliconWizard]

Incredible! Basically the cost of a resistor!

[coppice]

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.

[coppice]

Incredible! Basically the cost of a resistor!

Gee, your resistors are expensive.

[tsman]

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.

[SiliconWizard]

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!

[SilverSolder]

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...

[Mechatrommer]

Program Memory Size... 1KW... right.

[ali_asadzadeh]

Sadly It's OTP

[brucehoult]

Sadly It's OTP

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.

[tszaboo]

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.

[Mechatrommer]

i mean i thought 1 Kilo Watt, cant they find another shortcut for Word? for eg 1KWd?

[mikeselectricstuff]

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

[mikeselectricstuff]

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

[Mechatrommer]

You can go to the moon on 1K....

that is just a part from the story

[Red Squirrel]

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. 

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.

[Siwastaja]

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.

[PointyOintment]

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

The English datasheet, in §1.2, says:

IO space and memory space are independent

but the Chinese datasheet, as translated by Google Translate*, has the wording:

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.)

[Monkeh]

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.

[wraper]

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.

SRAM Bytes 16
Program Memory Size (KB) 0.375

[EEVblog]

Not released yet:

[EEVblog]

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.

[EEVblog]

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.

[EEVblog]

Program Memory Size... 1KW... right.

I did this project in under 1K

[Howardlong]

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?