The demand is finite. There is clear evidence that it has limits. When costs become great, the consumers set limits, create budgets and seek alternatives. Consumers are still figuring out where the cost/benefit lines are, and we can all see that the lines at least exist.
Across the board TI is moving to new fabs, new fab processes and 300 mm wafers. So the old tooling is going away and they're adapting legacy designs to the new processes. This changes component behavior, particularly analog stuff, like these op amps.
That's all inevitable and has happened in the semiconductor business before. When it happens, manufacturers are forced to choose; obsolete old parts that can't be indistinguishably reproduced on the new node, or and sell substantially different components under existing SKUs, so they can keep booking orders from high volume customers without disruption.
In this case, the latter is happening. In all probability their high volume customers have already accounted for the PCN because TI told them it was coming years ago, back when the new fab buildout started and the lithography machines were first ordered.
You see this in low cost products like MKS SERVO42x, where they're doing FoC with a GD32 MCU. It works; the motor runs cool, smooth and quiet, but the system is limited to 3000 RPM, and struggles with rapid acceleration because the control loop is too slow.
I have tried one. It has no torque. For what looks like an awesome product, it does not have the power to drive a peristaltic pump. I used the same motor on a TMC stepper controller and it's completely silent and works. It's open loop, so comparing apples to oranges but I am not sure what the MKS servo driver on a motor could actually do, aside from spin unloaded.
These can deliver 2.5-3A/phase, which should ample for a pump. Respectfully, I wonder what motor was involved and whether the current was configured: they come out of the box with conservative configuration so people don't burn up motors.
Field-oriented Control schemes modulate phase currents at high frequency; the feedback loop must be much faster than the motor phases. Until fairly recently, this stuff was the exclusive province of dedicated ICs (Trinamic et al.) and FPGA. Today, FoC can be done in (mostly) software with MCUs.
Fast feedback loops are also necessary in SMPS, another area where precision, low latency MCU peripherals and software are actively displacing traditional approaches.
But even if you update your PWM signal on every PWM cycle, you won't go much beyond 30kHz. At some point you're running into high switching losses on your MOSFETs.
S has never implied Xtensa, and C doesn't imply RISC-V. That's a widely held misunderstanding. S, C, P, etc. are product categories, not ISAs. S devices are high performance SoCs; large feature set, high frequency, not the lowest power or cost.
Just appending 1 to S3 is odd though. This MCU is step change for Espressif. S4 or something would make more sense.
Not saying you're wrong (appreciate the explanation) but S has been Xtensa and C is RISC-V; even if you don't imply, it's how the things have been. And given S2, S3, and C5 are all clocked at 240 MHz, the performance difference is kinda blur.
Espressif is all-in on RISC-V, expanding their portfolio of RISC-V devices where they previously had only XTensa: ESP32-S31 is the first big departure from the coincidental alignment of ISAs within their product structure and definitively ends further debate about what those letter designations mean.
BTW, S3 has an RISC-V core in addition to the XTensa cores. That's the part that's running in deep sleep.
In practice, most Espressif users barely know or care what ISA is in play: they have ESP-IDF and the Espressif libraries papering over the difference for nearly all purposes.
This is how Jeroen Domburg, Espressif Technical Marketing Manager, addressed this matter in a post on hackaday.io:
"We actually never intended the CPU architecture to be part of the name, as for 99.9% of all users, it doesn’t matter: you write your code in C or some other language, and the compiler plasters over any difference in ISA. Available peripherals, supported radio protocols and CPU power and memory are more important."
I'm excited that this MCU and the P4 has RISC-V CLIC. That puts it at least on par with Cortex NVIC and enables bare metal frameworks like Rust RTIC to work really well.
Also 4x MCPWM peripherals; that's a first for any Espressif MCU.
The additional GPIOs are very welcome as well. CAN-FD!
This device is going to be a big hit for Espressif.
Roku remotes are sophisticated devices. There are many models, so features vary, but among the possible features are 3.5mm audio output, Bluetooth audio, voice command input, Wi-Fi, infrared, battery charger and other things. Clearly a substantial MCU is present and thus, an RTOS.
Pretty sure they don't have gyroscopes and accelerometers anymore, but they did early on. It was basically a Wii Mote and I played a ton of Angry Birds on my TV.
Some chucklehead car review guy on YouTube is going to get their hands on one of these, put a Door Dash car topper on the roof and drive around town to see if anyone notices the $640k delivery vehicle. Few people will, and that's what's wrong: the entire point of Ferrari, for better or worse, going on 85+ years, is to get looks.
If all the people that have ever purchased a Ferrari for its interior design vanished today, there are so few it wouldn't make a headline. The Testarossa interior was so tragically bad it probably shouldn't have been permitted by the DOT et al. Yet there it was, plastered on posters and magazine covers; a thing of dreams around the world.
So only yet another case of complete disconnect between a brand and its loyalists. Not the first, and given the myopia plaguing such folk today, not the last.
The demand is finite. There is clear evidence that it has limits. When costs become great, the consumers set limits, create budgets and seek alternatives. Consumers are still figuring out where the cost/benefit lines are, and we can all see that the lines at least exist.
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