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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a pretty generic little microcontroller.

Why didn't the makers of this price label just use a little 10 cent off the shelf microcontroller? I doubt price tags are made in sufficient volume to ever get the engineering costs of a custom microcontroller low enough to go below 10 cents...

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> Why didn't the makers of this price label just use a little 10 cent off the shelf microcontroller? I doubt price tags are made in sufficient volume to ever get the engineering costs of a custom microcontroller low enough to go below 10 cents...

Are you sure about that? As a hypothetical example, imagine that Walmart is switching all of their stores over to eInk price tags. I found some numbers from 2005 for number of stores and SKUs per store at https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2005/01/06/our-retail...: multiplying out the number of stores with the average number of items carried gives you 500 million price tags.

It's Samsung. They love vertical integration and they have their own fabs. They probably rolled out their own internal microcontroller across all their tiny gadgets, so as not to be dependent on external suppliers.

They do use this same one in some industrial lighting controllers for buildings

$0.10 for a gadget like that is huge.

I work on the main chip of a gadget that cost thousands of dollars with high margins on the end product, and our customers don’t like it one bit when we require an additional external component that increase the BOM cost by $0.5.

There’s a person somewhere in the supply chain who’s job it is to question the cost and necessity of everything. If you don’t have that, engineers get frivolous quickly.

(It reminds me of the case, many years ago, where they asked me if we could swap a crypto chip with dedicated keys by a cheaper generic version that cost 1 cent less.)

10c is still too expensive for this type of mass production gadget. I would expect to see it priced at below 1c/unit.

10c is about the BOM cost for each of this price tag.

> 10c is still too expensive for this type of mass production gadget. I would expect to see it priced at below 1c/unit.

Is there any evidence for this? what volume do you mean by "mass production gadget"?

I highly doubt if any real data is published all of them are commercially sensitive and are under NDA. Mass production in this context is at least 1 million units.

Could you point to any data, circumstantial or otherwise that indicates a 1 cent device of this type? Perhaps you could elaborate on why you believe such a price point would be achievable or even offered. Otherwise, I'm sure you can understand how the rest of us might have difficulty evaluating the veracity of your claim.

EEVblog has a video of what could be possible. He is talking about 3c part. With direct negotiation at massive volumes, sub 1c part is definitely possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhAGnsnO7w

What has your experience been with the very cheap parts?

There are MCUs that cost less than 1c

Sub-cent is the realm of 4-bit mask ROM bare-die-only parts with a few dozen bytes of RAM, not an 8051 with 64k flash and integrated 2.4GHz radio.

I work on these kinds of tags and they're actually quite expensive, 10c is about the cost for the battery alone.

Micros with radios aren't that cheap. They are all rather unique too.

Perhaps as a kind of dongle, to prevent their product from being counterfeited?

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