Puya Semi's Sub-$0.08 Microcontroller Puts the Cheapest Arm Cortex-M0+ in the Palm of Your Hand
32-bit Cortex-M0+-based PY32F002 is super cheap, providing you're willing to buy in trays of 5,000 units.
If you're looking to build a medium-volume low-cost gadget around an Arm core, Shanghai-based Puya Semiconductor may have what you need: a Cortex-M0+-based microcontroller chip available for less than $0.08 per unit in 5k quantities.
Arm's 32-bit microcontroller cores are near-ubiquitous in the microcontroller market, filling a gap where eight-bit cores can't reach and application-class cores are simply too expensive. The PY32F002A, though, takes affordability to extremes, with a sub-$0.08 selling price in quantity, as brought to our attention by CNX Software.
The Puya PY32F002A is based on an Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller core running at an admittedly sedate 24MHz, with 3kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 20kB of flash storage — with support for SPI flash off-chip if you need more. The chip boasts up to 18 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, depending on package, one USART bus, an I2C bus, an SPI bus, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) capabilities, plus a 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) with up to nine channels.
Elsewhere on the chip are a range of timers: a general-purpose 16-bit timer, another 16-bit advanced control timer, a low-power timer designed to wake the microcontroller up from its deepest sleep mode, a system tick timer, and a watchdog timer. The part supports a supply voltage of 1.7-5.5V and comes in selection of packages.
While the PY32F002A grabs the headlines for its affordability — providing, of course, you're willing to buy in trays of 5,000 chips at a time — there are other models for those needing additional features: the PY32F003 increases the maximum RAM and flash to 8kB and 64kB respectively, the PY32F030 doubles the clock speed to 48MHz and adds extras buses plus a phase-locked loop (PLL) and an LED controller, the PY32F072 ups the clock speed again to 72MHz, and the PY32F403 switches the Arm Cortex-M0+ core out for a Cortex-M4 running at 160MHz.
Details on selected models are available on the Puya Semiconductor website; chips are available to order now from LCSC Electronics starting at $0.0787 for the PY32F002AL15S6TU in 5k trays — though this goes up to $0.1518 per chip if you only want five rather than five thousand.