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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Not that I've seen, but I also think it would not be productive given 8 bit micros are going the way of discrete TTL logic these days. When it is cheaper to buy a 32 bit machine with more flash and ram than an 8 bit machine in a similar package, the software folks always ask the hardware folks for the nicer machine.

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Well, sort of. It depends on your BOM cost targets. I remember seeing (a few years ago now) an AVR in a tiny 6 pin surface mount package about 0805-ish size. 8 bit micros are the new 555.

I have a friend that does a lot of consumer electronics development on contract. One of his favorite parts is an 8 bit micro that cost 6 cents in bare die, and that was a few years ago. The part is probably 4 cents now. A 4 dollar ARM looks rediculous next to a 4 cent part in certain application spaces.

But in my world - low volume mechatronics - the ARM with 1mb flash is the no-brainer choice.

Any idea where could one get that 4 cent mcu and how to assemble it ?

Those are volume prices.

Chinese supplier. It comes as passivated bare die. You glue it to the board, need a wire bonding machine to attach connectivity, and thn encapsulate it with a blob of epoxy. Serious volume stuff. The dev kit is a few hundred bucks though, so it is reasonable to work with. Reply if you are still interested. But if you aren't already assembling in China, it probably isn't for you.

Hey, any chance your hardware developer friend could spare a few minutes to talk about his/her work? I'm a freelance hardware+software developer and there's not many of us out there it seems. It would be great to get some feedback on some long-term business goals. You can reach me at contact5m4t@peakdata.io Thanks!

I'm one too, and I lurk on several subreddits these days.

OT, but are you from Jarnac? A good friend of mine lives in Tilloux

No, my handle comes from a famous duel. A case of judicial combat that undermined the French crown.

http://www.thearma.org/essays/DOTC.htm#.Wb8agK3Mzyg

The 8bit micros are becoming smaller and cheaper though, they're still very useful in certain applications that require very little power (both electrical and processing).

You are correct that there are places for them, But generally not places that need a high level language.

Which is the interesting thing for me. At the current processing nodes (22nm and even 45nm) the cost of the packaging and bin testing dominates. It costs, too a fairly close approximation, exactly the same to put a chip in that is 8 bits as it does to put one in that is 32 bits.

I had a great discussion with a product manager from ST Micro about this at their recent Developers Conference in the Bay Area. They had some collateral on the STM8 series and I asked about it and he shared the above but said that it was either legacy designs, essentially CPLD type designs, or HW engineers without a software person to support them that seemed to still use 8 bit machines. From ST's perspective the cost to produce was the same.

At Digikey the lowest cost 32 bit processor is 58 cents[1], and the lowest cost 8 bit processor is 40 cents[2].

[1] https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/stmicroelectronics...

[2] https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/stmicroelectronics...

> But generally not places that need a high level language.

Are you referring to Rust here?

Sometimes even C. Those little chips don't have enough RAM or flash to handle the overhead. Often the only choice is assembly.

16 bit seems more common than 32 bit, there's LOTs of low end processors. 32bit processors are expensive ( relatively ), and often don't have anywhere near as good low power operation.

On our product we have up to 4 processors, 1 32bit, 2 16bit, 1 8bit. Smallest only has 20bytes of RAM

Ideally I'd like to program them all with a super typesafe language

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