Comment by jiqiren
7 hours ago
He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.
Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.
The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.
Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.
A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.
> When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free.
China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.
Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.
If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).
Aliexpress doesn't just sell RISC-V parts... I've purchased dozens of STM32, GD32, nrf52 parts from Aliexpress and LCSC.