WCH and PUYA long term supply to "the west"

[woofy]

Is anyone in "the west"using WCH or PUYA microcontrollers in volume (10k/yr for me) production?
I keep looking at the low prices of ARM and RISC V controllers from these companies, but I'm fearful of getting reliable supplies months and years ahead. I been a Microchip user for a long time for one very good reason. They have never ever dumped a controller without having a near drop in replacement available. I trust them to supply in the future.
WCH and PUYA are unknown quantities for me, and maybe the long term cost of buying so cheap will be too high.

I've not tried to contact PUYA, but WCH has never responded to my enquiries, leaving LCSC as the only source of supply.

What do others feel about committing WCH/PUYA controllers to a long term (10+ year lifetime) product?

[PCB.Wiz]

Nothing is 100.00% certain, so always have a Plan-B
With MCUs, that usually means having a pin-compatible (or package compatible) alternate qualified.

lcsc parts do vanish and re-appear, see this comment :

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/$0-25-hk32f030m-(cortex-m0-32mhz-16kb-2kb)/msg4942864/#msg4942864

[wilhe_jo]

We (at my former employer) dumped microchip because of their supply, support an other issues... At around well over 100k per part.

ST seemed to give them hard times during chipageddon at well over 500k per part.

So YMMV with all of these suppliers.

To be honest, do yourself a favour at your size and start supporting 2 controllers in 1 firmware.
Especially with Cortex-m chips, you can do this pretty easily....

Btw: gigadevice (they have nice chips as well) got quite some reputation in the west for their memory products. I like their stuff, and TME has their stuff in their catalog... But they don't stock them regularly.

73

[SiliconWizard]

I don't know about PUYA, but you can contact WCH on Twitter. Have you tried that?

[DavidAlfa]

These days nothing is to be trusted.
Some Microchip devices flew away in the pandemic and didn't return yet, or did at insulting cost.
Same with ST, people would literally stab you on knowing you had them, if available they went from $1.5 to $7...10...
Still, which device are you checking?
Else than the ultra cheap py32f002a, the others are not specially cheap compared to ST's offer.
At 10K quantities you'll easily get the puyas at 8 cents or lower, I'd say just buy a ton and use them everywhere while they last, maybe adding a secondary footprint for a ST part if they dissapear in the future?
If it's a simple board, probably not so expensive to make a revision using a different mcu when the time comes?

Anyways before buying, fully develop the thing, you might find unexpected bugs, like the one I found when  placing the NVIC vectors in flash AND enabling RDP, that combination crashed the system when triggering IRQ by external events (CCP, pin change...), moving the vectors to the RAM solved it but it was a PITA to find out!
Puya support email didn't answer whatsoever.

[SiliconWizard]

Apparently buying from WCH is not a problem.

But I would still be concerned in the long run. Not particularly about these companies suddenly unable to supply, but more about western governments banning stuff from China and our inability to buy anything from there at some point because of that.

But as you mentioned, in the West we also have shortages for various reasons, so western parts are not a guarantee either.

These days, planning anything long-term is tough.

[woofy]

Thanks everyone.
What I was really looking for is to get an idea of how widely these devices are being used by western companies for production.
They are clearly being used to try, to play with and for hobby projects, as I see in other threads here. But that's a long way from committing to a product that will be in production for years.

I can't escape the feeling with the ultra low cost versions is that once the musical xmas card (or whatever) people move on the chips will be dropped. For myself there is too much uncertainty on long term supply to use them, but I was really curious as to whether others have them for production.

[mac.6]

Usually long term support/supply is contractual.
Some big name are also stating long term supply assurance on some parts or are known to supply for very long term (like microchip). But without contract these can be revoked any time, especially when there is a merging or reorganization.

Anything else is just word in the wind or leap of faith, especially with china semi companies.

[Pixie dust]

I am planning to start using the Puya processor in the west for a 10k/y quantity. At those prices say 10c you can buy an extra year supply for $1000. This gives me some breathing space in case something happens to the supply of Puya processors. So it's almost like an insurance for at least a year. Note that there are some Chinese suppliers which offer programming service for 1.5c a piece. I think that is not bad if you are not to concerned about piracy. I must say my project is price sensitive were the 10c of the processor makes up 50% of the BOM.

[peter-h]

I do not know anybody using Chinese MCUs for "constant" volume, apart from one firm which dumped ST (32F4 IIRC) for ESP32, during the covid panic, and AFAIK they continue to use ESP32 now because why not?

There is the obvious political risk, if China messes with Taiwan. Currently there are some indications this tension is reducing but there are lots of contrary factors which can be debated for ever. IMHO, in the long run, as China gets stronger militarily, people in the West will start to "get the message" that key parts should not be bought from a clear military enemy - unless you can just buy the entire production requirement up front and stock it.

What is not in doubt is the difficulty of communication with Chinese vendors. I've been buying from there for 30 years. The companies I use are just maybe 10% of those I tried to communicate with. Many others were dropped due to opportunistic practices (e.g. destruction of PCB tooling after 12 months; yes I know this is not unusual but it still stinks). To be fair, it can be just as hard to buy from say Italy (some amazing business practices, with both chips and engineering plastics) but at least you can just go there... I stopped making complete products there about 3 years ago when the Nth firm went bust just 2 weeks after the batch of product was loaded on the ship... a huge disaster avoided by 2 weeks.

So I'd say the decision is mostly strategic/geopolitical. I would not use any Chinese chip unless I can buy the whole stock up front, which I can with a < $1 LY68L6400SL which comes from various places like Alibaba, never the same one twice...

[SiliconWizard]

The ESP32 is a pretty "popular" MCU in many western companies. Definitely not something occasional. It looks like it's perceived as more "mainstream" than many other chinese MCUs. Probably due to its now relatively long history, and good availability along with decent documentation.

This isn't necessarily the case with many other chinese vendors indeed. While medium- to long-term supply is a concern, I'm not 100% sure this is any more of a concern than any other possible event we may be facing, which history has now showed us. I would have said what you said a few years back, but these days, who knows. As you mentioned, chinese chips happened to be actually easier to get ahold of than anything western for a good while, and it's really not unlikely to happen again. So, we just don't know, but I wouldn't bet on a much higher probability of problems these days. Unless, maybe, we fully sanction China for some reason, in which case, my friend, I'm telling you we're in big trouble and that would probably lead to a very nasty collapse.

As to communication and documentation, apart from a few exceptions, that is absolutely a problem with chinese vendors in general. I don't mean to sound "mean" or be fingerpointing, I have nothing against them, it's just an objective view of the situation. Many vendors will make it hard to get anything else in terms of information than what they have released, feedback/questions usually go silently unanswered, and SDKs and datasheets may never be updated in a timely manner. There's also a clear tendency not to release any errata docs, so you never quite know what could be wrong with a given chip until you run into the problem and have to figure it out by yourself. I don't know if it's a lack of resources, or if it has some cultural background to it (like, chinese companies are not supposed to make mistakes, so they will have a hard time admitting to them in any official document.)

Again, that's a general experience, but doesn't mean it's 100% like this always, there are of course exceptions to this, and maybe what I mentioned, in the grand scheme of things, is actually the exceptions. It wasn't meaning to be gratuitous bashing at all.

[PCB.Wiz]

Thanks everyone.
What I was really looking for is to get an idea of how widely these devices are being used by western companies for production.
They are clearly being used to try, to play with and for hobby projects, as I see in other threads here. But that's a long way from committing to a product that will be in production for years.

I can't escape the feeling with the ultra low cost versions is that once the musical xmas card (or whatever) people move on the chips will be dropped. For myself there is too much uncertainty on long term supply to use them, but I was really curious as to whether others have them for production.

Certainly the loss-leader prices may not last, but only products like musical xmas cards are that price paranoid.
You should run a BOM budget on the second cheapest source.

What package do you need ?
If you can pick a mainstream package like TSSOP20, there are shiploads of alternative parts you could qualify.

[peter-h]

The main issue with China (as I said I've been buying everything like PCBs, cables, machines parts, etc, etc for 30 years, and even used to make whole products there for 20 years) is basically this

- a firm of say 500 people may have just 1 who speaks English and when (not IF) he/she moves on, they have to find a replacement, so the comms gets broken and you get a series of weird emails from the new person

- the culture is dramatically different; in the West if somebody delivers crap you just tell them it is of poor quality, but a chinese chap will take it as you commenting on his mother's secual performance, and total excommunication is easy to achieve

- generally you cannot phone them, because the switchboard can't speak English, and this IS a big problem when you need to phone to check "new bank details" - see below

- their IT setup is usually totally amateurish and their email (usual gmail addresses!!!) is frequently hacked, so you get very plausible "new bank details below" emails, with all the right context, invoice numbers, PO numbers, because the hacker has the whole context, and phoning the company to check whether the bank details are genuine is hard (I have spent days doing just one of these), and they NEVER accept responsibility, they just say you have to pay again or you can f-k off (I got a 10% discount once)

- fast staff turnover - anybody with a brain moves every 6 months or so (the business scene is largely a dog eat dog and make a fast buck setup)

- customer details are completely routinely stolen when X moves to a new job so e.g. you send an order to JLCPCB or ITEAD and a few months later you get offers from other PCB firms with "all the right details", so your product details are probably stolen too, so never put the name of your product on your PCBs!

- destruction of tooling (it may be in the small print but...)

- vandalism (I've had multiple cases of custom gear smashed up when somebody had a bad day)

- real hard cases of ambiguity (e.g. a quote for a 2-part moulded case is actually for just one half of it, no matter how many times you email - and even Zoom - to SPECIFICALLY check this one damned point!!!) and of course it is always to their advantage

- payment is mostly 100% in advance, so maximum commercial risk + poorer cash flow

- air freight not viable except for high value / small parts, and sea freight (or train/truck) is slow - 25 days sailing time from China to Felixstowe in the UK and this is added to the above cash flow issue, so basically you can spend 3 months discovering that the stuff is crap

- freight is not cheap; you can easily be paying 10-20% on top for it

- you never actually know if the part is made by the firm "making" it, and when your supplier vanishes, you will never find the real mfg

The above points all add up to a significant extra cost, direct and indirect, and when you look at how much easier your life is doing stuff locally, the cost is not so much more. PCBs, cables and machined parts are one exception and are much cheaper in China. I looked at S Korea
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/avoiding-china-for-pcbs-anyone-tried-s-korea/msg4956838/#msg4956838
but it's hard to establish contact and for prototyping JLCPCB is much cheaper.

For amusement, read this
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/does-anyone-recognise-this-chinese-moulded-case-yorktron/msg4346914/#msg4346914

That said, you CAN develop long term relationships with firms there. Generally if you email a firm you dealt with 5 years ago and they are still there, that's a really good sign. I have ~5 good suppliers like that.

With chips, you will obviously never build a relationship. You are one of a thousand of customers, and decoupled from the chip mfg by multiple layers anyway.

The political risk will not reduce. It will increase as China builds up its military. The US is not stupid and they will take steps. It will take years but they will do it. Like the small step in Europe (way overdue) of not using Huawei 3G 4G 5G gear.