Jiangsu Qinheng Co., Ltd, better known as WCH, is famous for their USB to TTL chip such as CH340, but the company also offers various wireless MCUs, including some Arm Cortex-M0 based Bluetooth / Zigbee parts such as CH579.

But today, I was informed a new Bluetooth MCU showed up on WCH website: CH572 with a RISC-V MCU core @ 60 MHz.

We have limited information about the MCU, but here’s what we need so far about CH572 specifications:

Core – RISC-V MCU @ up to 60 MHz

System Memory – 10K SRAM

Storage – 96KB OTP (One-Time Programming) flash

Connectivity – Bluetooth LE

USB – 1x USB host, 1x USB device

Other Peripherals and I/Os 11-ch 12-bit ADC 3x 26-bit timers 11x PWM 2x UART, 1x SPI 23x GPIOs RTC and Watchdog

Supply Voltages – 3.3V/2.5V

Package – QFN28

The main downside is that’s an OTP flash, so you’d develop software using an ICE (In-circuit emulator), and once you are done and confident the software is stable enough, the manufacturer or maybe yourself can flash it to the MCU OTP flash. That means no firmware update is possible later on, but usually those parts are quite cheaper. CH572 is shown as being “在研”, which I understand means “under development”, so it’s unclear when it will become available.

Nevertheless, WCH CH572 is quite interesting, as AFAIK it’s one of the first RISC-V MCUs from a “traditional” silicon vendor that should be fairly easily procurable.

Thanks to Zoobab for the tip.