#112 A look at the Relatively new RISC-V IC

Since I have been using the ATtiny series of IC from microchip using the AVR instruction set I kept an eye out for similar chips.

After a few google searches I found 2 potential competitors:

Puya with their PY32F003F14P6T 32 Bit MCU 32bit ARM ® Cortex ® -M0+ Microcontroller Integrated Circuit

and

WCH (WinChipHead) with their CH32V003F4P6 series based on the 32-bit QingKe RISC-V2A core.

After some research I decided to purchase some of the WCH IC’s for testing. I setup a platform IO development environment and starter using the ch32v003fun open source software development stack for the CH32V003.

There is an Arduino core from the official WCH guys but it is still limited and slow for power users.

Once I finished setting up I found it very easy and intuitive to use the ch32v003fun development stack. There is a learning curve but I was able to test all my WCH chips within minutes. I purchased the CH32V003J4M6 4-pin, CH32V003A4M6 16-pin, CH32V003F4P6 20-pin, CH32V203C8T6 48-pin and the QFN20 CH32V003F4U6 20-pin.