GigaDevices GD32 boards replacements for the popular STM32 are now in stock

STM32 are one of the most popular Cortex ARM devices on the market as they are with aggresive pricing and nice features. The semiconductor crisis hit ST as all other semiconductor vendors and STM32 disappeared from the market. Many customers have been left for more than year without MCus.

GigaDevices is well known Flash memory manufacturer, they have range of ARM Cortex M3, M4 devices which are pin to pin compatible with STM32 MCUs.

We check GD32 assembled on our STM32 boards and they work equal the only difference we notice is that GD32 lack two wires JTAG SWD interface and only support the full JTAG, which is not big issue.

All code we test run equal on both STM32 and GD32.

Here are links for the GigaDevices based boards:

GD32-H103 header board equal to STM32-H103

GD32-P103 prototype board equal to STM32-P103

OLIMEXINO-GD32 Arduino like board equal to OLIMEXINO-STM32

OLIMEXINO-GD32F3 Arduino like board equal to OLIMEXINO-STM32F3

GD32-H405 header board equal to STM32-H405

GD32-P405 prototype board equal to STM32-P405

GD32-H407 development board equal to STM32-H407

GD32-E407 development board equal to STM32-E407

GD32-P407 development board equal to STM32-P407

GD32F103RBT6 – the STM32 pin to pin compatible Chinese MCUs sample test

Our previous blog post made lot of buzz about the STM32 pin to pin and functional compatible processors made by Chinese company Giga Device.

Some people at Giga Device got upset from the comments that they probably did STM32 cloning or do not pay ARM licensees and we received this letter from GD32 product family manager Eric Jin:

1. All the products provided by GigaDevice were developed by GigaDevice independently, and GigaDevice has its all intellectual property rights. As the third-party intellectual property rights, GigaDevice has obtained the intellectual property rights holder’s authorization.

2. All the products provided by GigaDevice do not infringe any third-party intellectual property rights.

3. It’s sure that for the record, GigaDevice are a legitimate ARM licensee :
https://community.arm.com/community/arm-partner-directory/partner-gigadevice-semiconductor

4. And GigaDevice is officially the ARM connected community member and the ARM university programme partner.

5. GigaDevice GD32 series of MCU got the trade mark in world wide such as US, Korea& Japan

6. The right of layout-designs of integrated circuits design of GD32 MCU is protected in China.
GigaDevice also have lots of US,EUROPEAN & INT’L PATENT concerning GD32 MCUs, examples check the attached patent file.

1 PCT/CN2013/075149 PCT International EMBEDDED SYSTEM CONTROLLER

2 14/399,858 US EMBEDDED SYSTEM CONTROLLER

3 13788134.8 EU EMBEDDED SYSTEM CONTROLLER

4 PCT/CN2015/071990 PCT International MCU

5 PCT/CN2015/071983 PCT International MCU

6 PCT/CN2015/071556 PCT International MCU

7. We also provide the “Intellectual Property Rights Guarantee letter” and the “Trademark Certificate” for your reference.

8. We will continue to highlight the advantage of our own in market, especially the family roadmap.

 

We got some free samples of GD32F103RBT6 and replaced the MCUs on STM32-P103, STM32-H103 and OLIMEXINO-STM32. To our surprise these boards pass all functional tests without any modifications, i.e. all the development tools, JTAGs, etc work with GD32 like they are STM32! Also all software code made for STM32 run the same way on GD32 devices, so you can re-use all STM32 code and libraries for these new devices.

How this will affect ST? I don’t know, but I guess not much. Big customers who make probably major share from the STM32 sales already have good prices directly from ST and will not move to something unknown which cost a little bit less.

The prices of GD32F103RBT6 in China are about 20% less than the price you can buy there original STM32 chips. If I was big company I wouldn’t move away from ST as GD32 devices have some claims for higher speed etc, but their web site is total mess and you hardly can find even simple datasheet, not to say that GD32 have no Errata, which is alert for us, in novadays device with no published errata usually means the manufacturer of this device is either hiding something either didn’t test it’s device well enough :). For  big projects switching to noname Chinese supplier is no go as the risks are huge.

For the small customers it’s another story. If Giga device can find reliable small distributors which to stock and sell their products in Europe they will have no competition by ST which use the old fat distribution channels left in Europe which charge for small quantities x3 the prices which is for big customers and obstracle competetive small scale production here.