Raspberry Pi Foundation Starts Bulk Sales of Microcontroller to Manufacturers
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened an online store for the bulk sale of microcontrollers to businesses. According to the foundation, other microcontrollers are poorly available due to chip shortages. Companies can use the RP2040 to make their own hardware.
According to the Raspberry Foundation, sometimes requests come in for thousands of chips to be delivered. Companies that can buy such large numbers of the microcontroller can now do so directly through the foundation. A webshop has been opened for this purpose, which offers the RP2040 on rolls. The price per chip is 0.8 dollars for 500 pieces and 0.7 dollars for 3400 pieces.
RP2040 bulk sales
Since June last year, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been selling the RP2040 microcontroller separately for $1 each. This sale takes place through the usual sales channels of the foundation. These are shops and web shops that deliver directly to consumers. The foundation already supplied the microcontrollers in bulk to hardware manufacturers, but that was only done by appointment. The new web store should make it easier for new parties to obtain microcontrollers.
According to the Raspberry Foundation, many other microcontrollers are poorly available due to chip shortages. The RP2040 is created on TSMC’s 40LP node. This is a relatively modern procedure for a microcontroller. The chips each have a surface area of 2mm², which means that about 21,000 pieces fit on a 300mm wafer. The foundation says it has reserved enough wafers to produce 20 million microcontrollers and more capacity is on the way.
The RP2040 is also on the Raspberry Pi Pico, which appeared at the beginning of last year. The complete module costs 4.50 euros. The microcontroller consists of two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores with a clock speed of 133MHz and 264 kilobytes of memory. The complete soc comes in a 7x7mm QFN56 package.
Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontrollers on a roll