Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Espressif has a huge advantage in lead times over ST recently. I migrated a few projects over because ST couldn't or wouldn't give us supply in under a month when you could buy ESP chips and have them on your doorstep practically overnight.

View on HN

Did you look at chinese STM clones? We used gd32, I liked it.

Wide product range. ARM and RISC-V all called GD32 with an extra letter for the exact line.

Depends if you want to condone IP theft (compatible independent developments is of course different but I'm not sure this is the case). R&D, Support, good documentation in English and accuracy of specs come at a price.

Is implementing the same peripheral register API really IP theft?

No, this was my remark about being compatible.

Espressif is Chinese company, just like gigadevices.

I don't think they do IP theft from STM32 (if it's even possible at current node size). They have very thorough datasheets different from STM32 ones and their own SDK with unique code (although it seems to be inspired by STM32 libraries, but absolutely not theft).

Nobody said that espressif steals IP from ST.

I don't think expressif steals from ST. I m quite sure GD steals from ST (source: ST themselves, see answer from ST in https://www.th3dstudio.com/2021/08/03/gd32-cpu-license-issue...)

If they didn't copy the peripheral blocks, then all they did was implement the ARM IP just like ST Micro did in a way to be pin to pin compatible with the STM32 chips. Happy to learn otherwise. I wouldn't put them in a real product for many reasons but this is not one of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com