Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and a new micro-controller with RISC-V and Arm?

I got the Jackpot^-1. Yesterday my latest RP2040 prototype boards arrived. . Well, there is always a rev 2. I will still write about them once I got them up and running. 

You meant your own design? I think you can swap RP2040 with RP2350 ( I think they are pin compatible). Not sure yet. Going though the datasheet now

No, they are not. The RP2040 is a QFN-44 QFN-56. The RP235x is a QFN-60 or a QFN-80.

Okay! I got confused. RP Pico and RP Pico2 are compatible! Not the SoCs. Thanks! 

RP2040 is QFN-56?

Yup, you're right.

I wish they would reconsider the pitch for future ICs. I guess coming from a mobile phone sort of customer history, they tend to go for the small sizes!

I wonder if many of their RP2040 customers really care for such a small pitch. Industrial customers wouldn't care if it was larger (if that's the sort of customers they are going to aim for, with their PIO protocol capabilities). Makes it less yield for their customers surely since there's no solder mask between the pads (or at least unreliable solder mask that fine).

Also, I wonder who will want the 56-pin variant, since the 80-pin offers a lot more GPIO (if the prices are similar! maybe there will be some price differentiation : ( I wonder if it's two different dies, since usually the GPIO takes up a fair bit of space on the silicon.

I wish they would reconsider the pitch for future ICs. I guess coming from a mobile phone sort of customer history, they tend to go for the small sizes!

I wonder if many of their RP2040 customers really care for such a small pitch. Industrial customers wouldn't care if it was larger (if that's the sort of customers they are going to aim for, with their PIO protocol capabilities). Makes it less yield for their customers surely since there's no solder mask between the pads (or at least unreliable solder mask that fine).

Also, I wonder who will want the 56-pin variant, since the 80-pin offers a lot more GPIO (if the prices are similar! maybe there will be some price differentiation : ( I wonder if it's two different dies, since usually the GPIO takes up a fair bit of space on the silicon.

I think their target market is people who integrate the chips into something else.

So either the Pico form factor is fine or you can afford/use an automated assembly process.

I mean it's just another annoyance, because industrial customers won't be fine-tuning their processes to the extreme like mobile phone manufacturers for hundreds of thousands of boards, and so they may well have a lower yield in production (i.e. automated assembly), with packages with no solder mask, or higher risk of broken solder mask, with fine pitch QFN.

I appreciate it's sometimes hard to design with the most reliable packages exclusively, sometimes manufacturers are forced to use tiny packages if that's all that is available if it meets their requirement in all other ways. But, adding another small package unnecessarily to a board design is only going to decrease the yield further. I'm struggling to find any high-performance ST microcontroller that is only available in such a fine pitch package, and they must have many industrial customers. Presumably ST customers are asking for the larger pitch.

I suppose it could be worse, rpi.org could have gone with 0.35mm pitch or lower.