Vango releases V32 series to enter the general-purpose MCU market
vango MCU

In the context of chip shortages, the supply-side capacity is frequently tight, and the gap in the MCU market can be said to be getting bigger and bigger. Many domestic MCU manufacturers are beginning to find their own way to break the game. There are not a few domestic MCU manufacturers, and it is roughly estimated that there are hundreds of them. Although domestic manufacturers do not make much money in MCU, many manufacturers are still eager to enter this market.
Of course, these manufacturers have their own considerations and reasons, and we will not explore the reasons here. Today, I will mainly look at a company that has entered the general-purpose MCU market—Hangzhou Wangao. Wangao recently released its general-purpose MCU series. This move means that Wangao, which was originally engaged in the field of power application MCUs, will enter the general-purpose MCU market and compete with other domestic and foreign manufacturers on the general-purpose track.
General MCU product layout
From the perspective of the general MCU market, Wan Gao is undoubtedly a recruit. Before the release of this new series, they did not make any moves in the general-purpose MCU market. From the perspective of Wangao's product layout, their products were mainly used in the three major areas of "main control, communication, and metering", and they were mostly used in power systems.
It is not difficult to understand that Wangao is a subsidiary of Beijing Zhixin Micro, and Zhixin Micro is a subsidiary of the State Grid. The matrix formed by its products in the context of the power grid is naturally centered on power projects. The main control chip "Haiyan" series with M0, M33 and M4 as the core, the communication chip "Flying Pigeon" series and the metering chip "Hummingbird" series form its product matrix.
The stepping stone for Wango to enter the general-purpose market is the newly released L0 series and F2 series of the V32 family. It is reported that Wango's general-purpose MCU is still based on the ARM core, and there are also RISC-V-based products. In a market where general-purpose MCUs are full of powerhouses, powerful MCU performance is necessary. Let’s take a look at the performance of the V32L0 series.
V32L0 uses the ARM Cortex-M0+ core. In this series, Wangao has improved the debugging and enhanced tracking capabilities through Keil to reduce the number of IPCs per instruction cycle. It also incorporates energy-saving and consumption-reducing technologies, but Wangao did not introduce the details of related technologies. We can see one or two from the power consumption. The current of this series is 0.6μA in deep sleep mode, 1.0μA if it is matched with RTC, and the power consumption is 140μA in normal working mode (24MHz). The wake-up time is also an indicator that users value, and the wake-up time of this series is 4μs. From the perspective of power consumption control, the first series seems to be doing well.

Wango's Taishan 200 is a RISC-V-based kernel, which is a self-developed kernel of Wango. It supports 16 general-purpose registers in the architecture and 16-bit compressed instructions. Support tightly coupled memory and single system bus interface on storage and bus. On the interrupt, an interrupt entry that supports the CLIC vector is made, and the interrupt response time is at least 4 cycles. Although the RSIC-V ecology has not been as perfect as the ARM ecology, judging from the trends of domestic MCU manufacturers, there are not a few that have begun to deploy in RISC-V.
Entering the general-purpose market is just the beginning?
Entering the general-purpose MCU market is just the first step for Wango. It is reported that Wango will target the motor MCU market next year. At the same time, the wireless MCU market is also within Wangao's consideration.
The editor here deliberately took a look at the V84 series of the Wangao main control series, which uses the Cortex-M4F core, with a maximum frequency of 180MHz, with a memory protection unit and a built-in FPU. The MCU is equipped with a 16-channel 12bit A/D converter, and the conversion time can be controlled at 0.5μs. The MCU is mainly used in new smart meter applications. In fact, because the MCU comes with PWM to support dead zone control and emergency braking, it is also a good choice for motor control. This may be one of the reasons why Wangao will target the motor MCU market next year.

(Source: Wan Gao)
Similarly, Wango has also covered the communication MCU business in the power system before. If Wango has a firm foothold in the general-purpose MCU and motor MCU market, it would not be surprising to enter the wireless MCU track.