Nyquest NY8A051H – 1.5 cent microcontroller: weekend die-shot

[userbinator]

At these sizes, the packaging is probably a significant fraction of the cost. They may also offer a bare die version at < $0.01 each.

Despite its name, this is not an 8051. Looks like this competes with the PIC10F200 which costs dozens of times more yet has a similar "RISC" (that's what they call it, but it's more like an 8-bit accumulator architecture) ISA and general layout.

[nine_k]

Packaging is always a significant fraction of the cost. It can be 20-30% for a typical MCU part, and nearly half of the cost for a complex chiplet-based CPU (where the internal assembly is indeed complex). I suspect that manufacturer's profit margins are lower than that, especially for simpler MCU parts.

[RantyDave]

English data sheet: https://www.nyquest.com.tw/upload/2024_02_293/NY8A051H_v1.6....

[dragontamer]

38kHz support for IR is a nifty feature (this is the "TV Remote" signal).

Its a real niche, this is probably the cheapest thing that can make a TV Remote. A couple of AA batteries and you'll have 5 years of life. Forget "sleep", a lot of TV Remotes just go fully off after each button press. When a button is pressed, reset the computer, figure out which button, send the IR signal at 38kHz and then turn off again. The end.

[actinium226]

It seems to use 1ma when on, so if you hooked this up to one of the larger smartphone batteries at 5000 mah, this could run for 200 days.

I'm not sure what you'd do with that, but I think as power consumption drops to 0 on these sorts of thing it might make some remote sensing applications cheaper/easier to deploy, if you could just deploy it with a battery and forget about it for a year or two.

[dragontamer]

1. I believe modern 8-bitters at 32kHz (yes: KHz. This is a very common wristwatch crystal and is the slowest you can run many chips....) use like 50uA.

2. If you take advantage of sleep states, it is possible to reach single-digit uA but this is difficult. Even the leakage currents of your capacitors (0.1uA to 10uA, depending on chemistry and conditions) starts to overwhelm your microcontroller.

3. Case in point. Internal leakage of most batteries is in the 1uA to 100uA range.

4. Alkaline (AA, AAA, AAA, and 9V) and CR2032 batteries are very very low leakage.

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2 years might be on the easy side, especially if you use AA batteries. That way a 10uA leak isn't really that big a deal. This is aiming at a 150uA circuit or less which is fine.

With a bit of effort, it's not too hard to run a circuit for 5 years. But you do need to really watch the leakage currents and carefully design it. That's under 70uA with the AA batteries.

10years is probably pushing it even with an Alkaline or Lithium CR2032, but it's theoretically doable.

[ComputerGuru]

Isn’t that rather a lot of current for what it is?

I didn’t read the datasheet but I imagine it has to have a lower power mode than that. Much larger MCUs can manage an average power consumption far lower and power off the same battery for periods measured in years, not days.

This is simple enough you’d think you’d be able to power it off an EM field directly!

[tambourine_man]

Add in a solar cell and it’s always on, effectively

[tasty_freeze]

I can understand how the material cost is low for such a tiny chip -- it said 337,000 of them fit on a wafer, but testing time must cost more than 1.5 cents per die.

[Aurornis]

Everything is automated. Testing a simple micro with few pins can be extremely fast.

Look up some modern factory tour videos. The RGB LED factory videos are interesting to watch. You can see how the bulk of the work is completely automated. Once the machines are set up, you let them run and collect the output.

[petra]

My guess is that testing complexity is a function of the number of gates, so it doesnt matter too much if they are on a big die or many small dies.

Also testing is an extremly paralell process, scaling with the number of connections you can connect to the tested wafer, and recent technology(from testing hbm ram) can really scale that:

https://www.formfactor.com/applications/high-volume-test-on-...

[bsder]

They probably don't test. Yield is likely high enough that failures are the responsibility of the customer.

Honestly, this is where I'd love RISC-V to be making inroads. It would be really nice to have a super simple processor with a standard architecture and tooling.

[metadat]

Impressive price point. I'd like to understand, what can you realistically do with these?

[dgacmu]

The 48 bytes of sram are enough to encode several state machines. It has pwm and dedicated IR signalling output, but no ADC for input.

It's generally designed to be a very simple controller-of-things. Push an up button, increase the pwm output up to some limit, etc. remote controls, fans, etc.,

[cpldcpu]

Use a neural network to detect numbers? (Well, this runs on a slightly more capable MCU, though)

https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2024/05/02/machine-learning-mn...

[theamk]

Most simple home appliances - microwave, air fryer, mixer/blender of some sort.

Toys, like a house which blinks lights and plays tinny music when a button is pressed (as long as speech / complex sounds atr bot involved)

Remote control toys (with external transceiver)

[selcuka]

Make a LED candle?

https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/a-led-candle-based-...

[dragontamer]

The 38kHz signal support clearly indicates that this is a TV Remote Control chip.

[azubinski]

Nothing.

[claxo]

The page linked to buy the product say 10 pieces in stock, and 'not recomended for new designs'.

Following the link in that page to manufacturer and then to 'microcontroller units' shows 14 products, all 'not recomended for new designs', except for the ones with zero stock.

[alright2565]

How does programming on this thing work? The datasheet doesn't go into very much detail, except there's SDI, SDO, SCK, and Vpp pins.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Like an 8051, I guess?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCS-51

ny8a051h

[proee]

What would be a comparable early computer with the same computational power? Amazing to think how a machine the size of a room is now only a penny!

[YZF]

It's an 8-bit processor running at up to 20Mhz. Maybe an Apple-II would be a comparison. Likely the 6502 had a more powerful instruction set. Apple II had a 1Mhz 6502.

[nick7376182]

This chip: 8 MHz, 8 bit processing  1K x 14 bits EPROM.  48 bytes SRAM.  6 general purpose I/O pins (GPIO), PB[5:0], with independent direction control.

In comparison to the usual suspects like Apollo guidance computer or TI-83, it has a higher clock speed but shorter word length and extremely limited ram and memory. Precisely due to the cost engineering - this is meant to run simple, limited size programs.

[dragontamer]

The 8051, first released in 1980, the 8051 effectively created the microcontroller market. 4kB ROM and 128B of SRAM for the original 8051. It always was on the small side.

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We have to go earlier than 1980 but I'm not quite familiar with all of those computers.

[ComputerGuru]

Do you have to get these programmed at the factory?

[petra]

Programming is done by selecting a memory address and burning the fuses behind it, using higher voltage.

Or it can be done via laser, scanning the wafer and burning the fuses.

[BarsMonster]

No, it's field-programmable. But you can only do it once.

[dmitrygr]

Another clone of PIC12 ISA it seems. These are common