I have done this a bunch of different times, mostly to resolve sourcing disputes. Dissolving in boiling sulphuric acid/nitric acid will make quick work of most epoxy packaging

IMO, I have mostly seen mislabeling, rebinning, and passing off obvious QC rejects.

example from many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6DfBuPwAAA

It may not even be a clone. As the author said, it could just as easily be production line items that were tested and found to be outside of spec tolerances and resold off-label.

I don't know if we can ping people here, but this looks like something that would be right up Ken Shirriff's alley.

1. https://righto.com

I think you might both be right- the author may be thinking of lower cost MCUs only aiming for tolerable ADC performance, while you might be thinking of all MCUs, even higher cost.

The RP2350 has 9.2 ENOB on a 12 bit ADC. Sure, you might be able to decimate multiple samples to get more bits out of them, but the spec sheet supports the author's claim (https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/pico-sdk/hardware....). There are even lower cost MCUs like the CH32V003 that have even worse ADC performance.

On the other hand, some MCUs can definitely do 10+ bits, such as the STM32H7 line which gets 13+ ENOB from a 16 bit ADC. This is impressive, but the H7 MCUs are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than the RP2350, so they might not be something the author tinkers with much. https://www.st.com/resource/en/application_note/dm00628458-g...

Hey, you can also arrange 2 GPIO pins in 1st order sigma delta topology with two external resistors, a capacitor and disabled hysteresis.

With RP2040 (and an LDO for supply), using two such channels for pseudo differential measurement (the second one just tracks threshold noise) I typically obtain 16 ENOB at 1 kHz, more at DC.

It is critical to avoid any periodic activity on the chip, though. Putting cores to sleep and then waking them up again causes huge spurs. One has to e.g. sleep for random intervals to spread them around. Same with flash. USB can be used, it's noise doesn't normally exceed -100 dB for me.

Fun stuff!

PS: I have not tested DC accuracy. One would likely use a channel with reference and hope that GPIOs are well matched. Could be used to e.g. sense CC lines on USB or analog joysticks and other non-critical, low accuracy stuff.

I tested a few STM32F103 dev boards, using a Siglent SDM3055 multimeter and Siglent SPD330X power supply.

The chip has a 12bit SAR ADC. Layout and board design mattered a lot, but even the worst ones had 10 bits worth, and the best one had nearly 12 bits effective.

That was without doing too much on the software side, meaning the other modules weren't running, besides a single serial output. On the bad boards the serial affected it, but on the good board very little.

I was planning on using (genuine) ADS1115s for a project but ended up going with an STM32g071 instead. It was cheaper, easier to source at the time (surprisingly) and much more flexible. The newer STM32g/h series ADCs have fewer hardware/software footguns than the old f103 et al.

Glad I wasn't the only one thinking this.

The paragraph ending with "Compare that with a microcontroller ADC with a fixed 3.3 V range: 9 ENOB steps are ~6 mV" also seems to insinuate that no MCU has an analog reference that's independent from the supply, which just isn't true at all. Hell, NXP has a few that have a built-in programmable reference.

Interesting, most of the counterfeits that affect me (eg. FTDI, STM32 clones) have been just straight up clones developed from scratch, not excess inventory / ghost shifts / packaged rejects. I guess it might be a digital/mixed-signal split, with the two worlds having different issues?

(also interestingly the STM32 clones I've seen had stacked die flash because they didn't fab them in a technology that could also do flash, so you can easily tell the counterfeit from sanding down the package and looking for an extra set of bonding wires; it's also a cool place to access the internal flash bus if you wanna bypass some readout protection :) )

Author here. I did consider this, as others have reported getting ADS1015 marked as ADS1115. If it were an ADS1015 the readout would be truncated at 12 bits. These parts definitely delivered 16 bits of readout.

> To get something faster we switched to ADS7953. It has 16 channels and runs 10 times faster.

I recall reading about a project at CERN to design a 12bit ADC chip that could sample at tens of GHz, maybe 50 or more.

I was perplexed at how they could achieve this.

Turned out it was the same we programmers do. Parallel processing.

They had taken a 12bit SAR unit which ran at like MHz rates, and just cloned it many times. They then had a large analog multiplexer in front to route the signal to the active ADC unit in a round-robin fashion.

That takes a lot of chip real-estate, and the analog muxer had to be carefully designed.

For a simpler approach to speed there is Flash ADCs[1], which kinda brute-force it.

For precision I know multi-slope ADCs[2] are often used.

Sadly I don't know much about the history, and would also love to learn more about it. Bound to be some fascinating stories there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_ADC

[2]: https://www.analog.com/media/en/training-seminars/tutorials/...

> The ADS7953 is somewhat of a ferrari, whereas the MCP3208 feels like a Toyota, simple to use, unimpressive performance.

What about the AD9226? It only has a single channel but can do up to 65 MSa/s at 12 bits. I bought one as a module for around $12 on AliExpress to experiment with software decoding of analog video. I only run it at 20 MSa/s and only use 8 bits because, funnily enough, the limiting factor is the speed at which I could get the data into my laptop. I connected it to a Raspberry Pi Zero and use the SMI peripheral as described here: https://iosoft.blog/2020/07/16/raspberry-pi-smi/

Ultra high-speed ADCs are extremely ugly to handle with microcontrollers. That's mostly FPGA territory: toggle its pins, suck the data from the ADC and offer them on a friendly parallel bus for a microcontroller (USBC->Parallel interface from FTDI).

They need a lot of pins to be toggled. Otherwise they spit out no data.

And a lot of manual stuff means it's super DMA unfriendly. And you need DMA for high-speed stuff.

Hah, damn. We live in different worlds - in mine, 100K samples/sec is blazingly fast!

I'm currently working on a PLC program, replacing the PLC's basic cyclic input sampling (max 2K samples/sec) with a harder-to-use mechanism that lets you access the raw data off its 12-bit ADC at 10K samples/sec, which we consider unusually speedy.

Never had bigger issues ordering from LCSC. And I buy a lot of stuff from them.

These numbers add up fast when you have dozens or hundreds of components on your board. A $3 part is often one of the most expensive items on a board! If you're trying to get something shipped to consumers for $20 each, with an enclosure, packaging, shipping, retail markup, and profit...that's a huge price disparity.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, the test rig is a lot simpler and a lot cheaper if you can generally trust manufacturer data. Sure, send off a few samples (likely prototypes with parts from Digikey instead of LCSC) to run extended testing in an environmental chamber with thermal imaging, build an endurance test rig that pushes the button once a second for four weeks to simulate once-daily use for years, whatever you want to do...but after that, if TI says it's good from -40 to +125, you're going to trust them on a lot of the edge cases.

Do 100% testing of the things you can test in-circuit if you can - power it up at room temperature and make sure it works once - but that doesn't mean you get the actual rated performance across all published environmental conditions.

Bullshit.

LCSC is a grey market distributor whose sources of supply are of untraceable, dubious provenance. They are neither ECIA member nor participating distributor.

Weird follow up without apologizing for smearing LCSC with no evidence whatsoever. Imagine someone writing a blog post like

"LLMs produce AI slop on regular basis. This piece of code I found somewhere on the web sure is AI slop, I never saw any code by James Bowman but _I very much think these are made with the_ AI slop generators _or similar_". And the follow up is "Remember James Bowman? _I’m still curious about_ his code. I might look at it in something or other at some undetermined point in the future to see how it performs." Does that sound even remotely ok?

Its not even guilt by association. Its guilt by gut feeling? prejudice?

> Single cycle readings defeat the point of sigma delta ADC setups.

The ADC's internal delta-sigma ADC takes a lot of samples at a much higher modulation frequency and presents them as a single output value.

You do not get the direct delta-sigma output from an ADC like this. The internal logic handles that for you. It's okay to take single samples of the output.

OP is using the chip with the data rate set to 8 samples per second.

Natively/internally, it runs at 860 samples per second, and you can configure it to provide that data at a lower sample rate at lower noise levels by averaging multiple readings together internally.

Well, if you're trying to measure DC extremely accurately the old stuff is still golden. Multi-slope is the gold standard and no one will sell you one. Delta-sigma get most of the way there.

https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ

And if you want to see CERN's multimeter, check this out.

https://youtu.be/D28uSzCs7-k

Marco Reps is a treasure.

Curious too. The part in question has been around for a while.

> Why don't they integrate good ADCs?

There are a bunch of reasons but the primary reason is that good ADCs are made using a different mixed signal process than microcontrollers. MCU ADCs are capacitive charge-balancing successive-approximation type which limits their sensitivity and precision.

Standalone ADCs also eliminate significant sources of noise like temperature fluctuations and electronic noise (the digital logic on the chip often runs at less than 1Mhz for example)

If hate the esp32 adc, let me introduce you to its "fpu." Or its external flash and memory...

LCSC is definitely genuine. I'm not sure why people are so surprised that companies like Mouser have insane markups.

Honestly: no one of the bigger players in the industry pays the prices you see on Digikey/Mouser/Farnell (with the exception maybe for prototyping stuff). Often you have direct delivery contracts with the vendors.

That the ADS1115 costs <$1 on LCSC means they buy millions from them every year. They are one of the biggest trustable players in Asia.

I have access to our internal STM32 pricing. You'd be shocked.

For regular readers of this blog, that would be like defining USB for a general tech audience. Other articles by this author expect the reader to also know terms like I2C and SPI.

I thought they were talking about League of Legends players, whoops