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Decap a Chinese chip at home: Clone or not?
It has been a while before I posted something useful. On my search for obscure chips, I came around another interesting Chinese chip (which I don't reveal yet). The chip was advertised as a cheap drop-in replacement for a American IC so I suspected it would be a...
Seasonal Greetings
As the last days of 2018 are ticking away, it is time to overthink the last year. Last year was a bit of exploring of Chinese chips. We covered the Gigadevices GD32 in dept intro, solderability, blinkaled, UART and SPI. We also found a very cheap ARM microcontroller...
SWM050 board back in stock
A couple of days ago, I got a notice from Tindie all the SWM050 boards were sold. I also noticed the stock on LCSC of these chips had gone down dramatically. Despite I think the use is limited of the chip, there seems to be a quite interest in it. Many thanks to all...
The ARM chip that wont cost an arm and a leg
Searching the prequisite Chinese websites to satisfy my shopping fetish I came across a neat litte ARM Cortex-M0 chip which is a extremely good bang for buck. It is the SWM050 made by Synwit, which, I believe, is the smallest chip available in a reasonable...
STM32F103 vs GD32F103 Round 4: SPI Master
This is part 4 in the series where we compare the STM32F103 with its Chinese counterpart the GD32F103. Both are ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers which are mostly pin, peripheral and register compatible. Now we compare the SPI master peripheral of both chips. SPI is a...
STM32F103 vs GD32F103 Round 3: UART
Since the GD32F103 can run as fast as 108MHz but has not a proper USB clock divider to provide a 48MHz clock for USB communication we need another way to communicate with the outside world. Since the early days of computing the easiest way to go is a asynchronous...