A 10-cent RISC-V microcontroller from China? Why not?
By Steven Leibson, EE Journal | April 28, 2025
Just as I was finishing my previous article about a new TI microcontroller that was smaller than a grain of white rice and sold for 16 cents in thousand-unit quantities, I learned of another new microcontroller based on a proprietary implementation of the 32-bit RISC-V processor ISA that sells for 10 cents (presumably in volume). This new microcontroller from WCH, aka Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics, a Chinese chip and IP vendor based in Nanjing, China. (“WCH” appears to be an abbreviation for “WinChipHead.”) The microcontroller is the WCH CH570, which has 12 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM and 240 Kbytes of Flash EEPROM for user code. It also integrates internal controllers and PHYs for USB 2.0, WiFi, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0. How could I resist looking into something like that?
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