I love it. I have noted this article for my talk about how CPUs are free. To appreciate that, you have to understand that when the first microcomputers came out engineers were still in "compute" mode[1], we were lectured that you wouldn't use a hard coded loop to check for a switch closure, you had to use
interrupts because otherwise you were
wasting all those CPU clocks. And computing at the time was often billed in weird units like "kilocoreseconds" (which is the number of seconds * the number of 1024 word pages of core (RAM)) that were consumed when your program ran.
The logical extreme end of Moore's law was that you could put a CPU into a very, very small amount of silicon and that meant they were essentially free. (Chips cost by die area & layers). Another article like this is Bunnie Huang's discussion of the ARM CPU in flash chips[2].
There have always been jokes that it is cheaper/easier to use an 8 pin uController than it is to use a 555 timer, and the argument has often come down to the current and voltage ranges that a 555 can work under are different, but at some point I expect to finally see the "blending" of analog/digital chips that allow for a wide range of voltages (on board switching PMIC), and analog pins that have few if any compromises for being either digital or analog.
[1] The Chip Letter -- https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tiny-computers-from-tex...
[2] On Hacking MicroSD Cards -- https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
The logical extreme end of Moore's law was that you could put a CPU into a very, very small amount of silicon and that meant they were essentially free. (Chips cost by die area & layers). Another article like this is Bunnie Huang's discussion of the ARM CPU in flash chips[2].
There have always been jokes that it is cheaper/easier to use an 8 pin uController than it is to use a 555 timer, and the argument has often come down to the current and voltage ranges that a 555 can work under are different, but at some point I expect to finally see the "blending" of analog/digital chips that allow for a wide range of voltages (on board switching PMIC), and analog pins that have few if any compromises for being either digital or analog.
[1] The Chip Letter -- https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tiny-computers-from-tex...
[2] On Hacking MicroSD Cards -- https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554