PCB News - PCB development: small hardware is about to dominate

Circuit board development situation: small hardware is about to dominate

The number and types of microcontroller boards and single-board computers have grown tremendously in the past few years. Just as the advent of cheap home computers in the early 1980s brought an explosion of types and choices, the number of microcontroller boards on the market today also shows that PCBA manufacturers have made a variety of functions and sizes. try.

However, the times are different now, and the trend that drives the growth of microcontrollers is leading the market in a different direction from the past. In the 1980s, those new home computers were not only luminous screens, but magic boxes with many functions. Computers, smartphones and tablets are now regarded as communication tools. Now, a microcontroller, even a "real" computer, is just a brick without a network connection.

Review

The current microcontroller board market started with development boards, basically because PCBA manufacturers have new chips to market before launching these expansion boards. These boards allow professional engineers to do testing before ordering thousands of chips to be placed in the product.

For amateur players, these development boards are designed for professionals, and the prices are generally too high to be practical. Mainly speaking, these now highly respected PIC microcontrollers can be said to be the basis of electronic devices in the maker movement, and they are introduced in the form of chips rather than circuit boards.

Various PIC microcontrollers.

In our current era, microcontrollers can be easily mounted on circuit boards. This is a phenomenon turned on from the Arduino. This "small blue board" has changed the way we make electronic products, not only for amateur players, but also for professionals. Expensive development boards without detailed documentation have given way in the professional market to easier-to-operate and cheaper microcontroller boards. This is a good thing for everyone, including professionals, and thanks to Maker.

Foresight

Network-connected smart devices, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), have become increasingly popular and have also changed the face of the microcontroller board market.

The current generation of circuit boards already have radios, and some even have many sets of radios. Before the development of IoT, microcontrollers played the role of computers in the past and were regarded as tools for automation or control. And now they have become communication tools.

The difference is that they almost communicate with each other instead of communicating with us.

The radio antenna on the Adafruit Feather board.

Put it up if you want

The market for microcontroller boards is undergoing transformation, and as the way computers are used changes, so does the production of hardware. Therefore, PCBA manufacturers will panic because they are not completely sure what the product will be used for, and then they will "just add another wireless device."

The trend of the past two years has resulted in the advent of this circuit board that I call "everything", which aims to carry all the needs of all users. This is particularly obvious on Kickstarter, because fundraisers try to differentiate their circuit boards from competitors.

After all, the microcontroller must be used to control things, which means that it will not have a single purpose. However, this does not mean that a single circuit board with all functions and all wireless devices should be used to do all the work that the microcontroller may do. . "All you have" boards are generally equipped with multiple sets of wireless devices and more CPU and RAM than most embedded devices. And this kind of hardware is expensive. Such a "Supreme Magic Board" will never be a suitable board for use. Just like the UNIX command line, we should try to make exquisite and simple hardware tools, rather than such a huge hug.

Size issues

The end of the early home computer era also caused a decline in computer size and specification diversity. Microcontrollers are also going through the same process, and for single-board computers, the same is true to some extent.

People should try to make sophisticated, pure hardware tools, not huge arms.

The "classic" Arduino configuration, including the annoying irregular spacing between the 7th and 8th pins, has naturally become a standard or even a default specification. In addition to imitations, the Arduino community also brings various expansion boards and other hardware corresponding to its configuration. In other words, even if the board is different from the Arduino in operation, it will still be similar in appearance.

The spacing between pins 7 and 8 on various Arduino sizes.

The designs of other PCBA manufacturers have gradually become standardized. For example, Adafruit's Feather development board series has standard configurations, and there are already imitations and competing brands that have begun to copy.

In smaller markets, there is also a wave of PCBA manufacturers starting to produce integrated modules on single boards. The tooth-shaped module, which is often installed on other circuit boards, has become the main channel for the use of small surface-mounted components, and has entered the broad community without tools or technology, so that they can directly use it. This phenomenon is particularly obvious after the advent of ESP8266, and it also makes the form of ESP-12 become the mainstream. Competitors such as RTL8710 are now also beginning to adopt similar configurations, and some even have compatible pins.

Similarly, the configuration of Raspberry Pi is often imitated, and several new development boards are even copied completely. One of them is Tinker of Asus, which quickly laid the foundation for low-cost media centers. The popular Raspberry Pi Zero has also recently launched a wireless version, which makes it much easier to use and is bound to attract others to imitate. However, we have not observed a comprehensive size standardization of single-board computers, at least not yet. Just like the pin header of Arduino, the pin header of Raspberry Pi has naturally become the default standard, which may be enough for the SBC market.

Cheap enough to be regarded as a throwaway computing technology

General-purpose microcontroller boards with in-flight Wi-Fi are now available for less than two dollars, and a single-board computer can be purchased for a little more. Even for those of us who grew up watching Moore's Law, this is hard to imagine, and in this era we have entered, computing technology is not only cheap, but almost free.

A Raspberry Pi Zero, ESP8266 and CHIP.

This has changed the way people use microcontrollers. ESP8266 has become a winner, and in many respects, it is popular with PCBA manufacturers who have no opinion on the market, and the "has everything" board is popular, and it is moving towards an IoT solution.

Sometimes, "just right" is best.

The success of ESP8266 also comes from its fast-growing community. The gathering of this community is not because of the functions provided by the circuit board (there are other small-sized wireless development boards), but because of a feature that other circuit boards do not have: price. This makes ESP8266 become the "third community" in the field of Maker electronic components in addition to Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Although part of the success comes from the compatibility of ESP8266 and Arduino, the Lua development environment created by the ESP8266 community is actually more common, showing that price is indeed the driving force for the community to choose products. It seems that sometimes it just needs to be "just right".

FPGA comes out

Field programmable gate array (FPGA) is very different from microcontroller. On the microcontroller, you can control the software, which is the program code stored on the chip. But on FPGA, it starts with a blank sheet of paper. You will need to design the circuit. Before it is designed, no processor will execute your software.

What most people and most Makers want to do is solve problems. For a certain group of people, the specifications of the circuit board are very important, but these people account for a very small number. What some PCBA manufacturers don't recognize, or even make mistakes again and again, is that most people don't need performance beyond their requirements. They would rather pay less to buy suitable tools than to spend more money to get extra performance. All in all, most people don't need the all-powerful "Supreme Magic Board" development version, unless they want to use it to conquer the world.